I Stopped Typing for a Week. Here's What Happened.

I set a rule on a Monday morning: no typing unless absolutely necessary. Passwords, terminal commands, the occasional proper noun my app couldn't catch. Everything else, I would speak. Seven days later, my hands felt better, my drafts were longer, and I had learned something uncomfortable about how I write.

Day One Was Awkward

The first few hours were rough. I kept reaching for the keyboard out of habit, the way you reach for your phone without thinking. Dictating a Slack message felt ridiculous. I mumbled. I restarted sentences. I said "uh" seventeen times in a two-paragraph reply.

But I kept going. I use VoiceInk, which runs entirely on my Mac without sending audio anywhere, so I wasn't worried about someone's server logging my half-formed thoughts. I just pressed my shortcut, talked, and the text appeared wherever my cursor was. Slack, Notion, my email client. It didn't care.

By afternoon, the awkwardness started to fade.

By Day Three, I Was Faster

I write for a living. My typing speed sits around 85 words per minute, which I always thought was plenty. Dictation pushed me closer to 130. That gap matters more than it sounds. A 500-word email draft that used to take eight minutes took five. A 1,200-word article I would normally spread across two sessions came out in one.

More interesting than the speed was the tone. My dictated writing sounded more like me. Less stiff. I wasn't stopping to fix typos mid-thought, which meant the thoughts stayed connected. I'd read back a paragraph and think, yes, that's actually what I meant to say.

The Hard Part: Editing

Dictation did not make editing easier. If anything, it made it slightly harder. I had more raw material to sort through, and some of it was genuinely rambling. Voice gives you quantity. It does not give you quality for free.

I also had to build a small system. I started saying "new paragraph" aloud as a habit, and I used a notes doc to dump ideas before shaping them into anything real. Think of it like the difference between a voice memo and a finished script. You still have to do the work of turning one into the other.

What My Hands Were Telling Me

By day four, I noticed something I hadn't expected. The low-grade tension I usually carry in my forearms was gone. I hadn't realized it was there until it wasn't. I type for six to eight hours a day on a normal week. That's a lot of repetitive motion I'd normalized.

I'm not saying I had a serious injury coming. But the absence of that fatigue was a signal I couldn't ignore. My hands were quieter. My shoulders sat lower. Small things.

Day Seven: What I Kept

When the week ended, I went back to typing, but not entirely. I now dictate first drafts of anything over 300 words. I dictate most emails. When I'm stuck on a section, I talk through it before I write a single word, which turns out to be a reliable way to get unstuck.

I still type for code, for editing, for anything that needs precision. But dictation carved out a real place in how I work, and it didn't take long to feel natural.

The strangest thing? I stopped dreading long writing tasks. When you know you can talk something out at speaking speed, a 1,000-word article stops feeling like a slog.

If you've been curious about voice dictation but assumed it was too clunky or too slow, one week is enough to find out whether it fits. The friction is front-loaded. After a few days, it mostly disappears.