I Stopped Typing for a Week. Here Is What Happened.

I type fast. Around 85 words per minute on a good day, which put me in the comfortable delusion that I did not have a bottleneck. Then I read that conversational speech averages 130 words per minute and decided to test the gap myself. I would dictate everything for one week: emails, notes, drafts, Slack messages, all of it.

What followed was uncomfortable, then surprising, then genuinely hard to reverse.

Day One: Slower Than Expected

The first day was humbling. I kept stopping mid-sentence to mentally backspace, even though there was no backspace key involved. I said "um" constantly. I dictated half a sentence, panicked, and stopped speaking as if silence would undo what I had already said.

I also realized I had no idea how to punctuate out loud. "Comma" felt ridiculous. I skipped punctuation entirely and cleaned it up after, which added time but kept the words flowing.

By the end of day one, I had produced about 800 words of usable content. Less than a normal day, but I had also spent the first six hours learning a new physical habit from scratch.

Day Three: Something Shifted

By Wednesday, the awkwardness mostly disappeared. I stopped trying to dictate the way I type and started actually talking. The sentences got longer. They sounded more like me.

I noticed I was using words I never type. Not because I do not know them, but because they are slow to spell. "Consequently." "Periodically." "Counterintuitive." When the physical cost of a word drops to zero, your vocabulary quietly expands.

I was using VoiceInk to pipe text directly into whatever app I had open. No switching windows, no copy-pasting from a transcription box. I would press the key, say the thing, and it appeared. The friction was low enough that I started capturing thoughts I would have previously let go.

Day Five: The Email Problem Dissolved

I hate writing emails. Not the thinking part, the typing part. The way a simple reply can take eight minutes of drafting, deleting, and rewording until it sounds human.

On day five, I dictated a detailed client email in about ninety seconds. I read it back, fixed two words, and sent it. The tone was warmer than my usual typed emails. It sounded like someone actually wrote it.

I started dictating every email. My response time dropped from hours to minutes, not because I was being sloppy, but because the effort cost had collapsed.

Day Seven: The Uncomfortable Realization

By the end of the week, I had written roughly 14,000 words across documents, emails, and notes. My average typing week sits around 6,000 to 7,000. The output had roughly doubled.

More interesting than the volume was the quality of the first drafts. They were messier in punctuation and cleaner in thought. When I type, I edit while I write. The result is polished but thin, every sentence filed down before the next one arrives. When I dictated, ideas arrived whole. The editing pass was longer, but I had something real to edit.

The hard part was admitting that I had been wrong about my own process for years. Fast typing is still slower than talking. And the editing is not the bottleneck anyway, getting the raw ideas out is.

What I Kept After the Week

I did not go fully voice-first permanently. Some things still feel faster to type: short commands, passwords, code. But first drafts, emails, notes, and anything where I need to think and write at the same time, those are dictated now.

The week cost me one uncomfortable day and gave me back hours each week. That math is not complicated.

If you have been typing everything out of habit rather than preference, one week is enough to find out whether that habit is still serving you.