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

I decided on a Monday morning that I would not type anything I could speak instead. Emails, notes, drafts, Slack messages, all of it. I gave myself one exception: anything requiring a password or a code snippet. Everything else would come out of my mouth first.

By Wednesday I was a convert. By Friday I was annoyed it took me this long.

Day One: Awkward and Slow

The first morning was rough. Not because dictation didn't work, it did. VoiceInk picked up my words cleanly, dropped them wherever my cursor was, and stayed out of the way. The problem was me.

I kept stopping mid-sentence to second-guess my phrasing. I'd start an email, trail off, restart. I was editing while speaking, which is the same bad habit that slows typing down. I had just moved the habit to a new input method.

I wrote about 800 words that first day. Normally I'd write two or three times that.

Day Two: Something Shifted

I made one rule change on Tuesday morning: no stopping mid-sentence. Speak the whole thought, then look at it. Fix it after.

That change was almost everything. Words started coming faster. Paragraphs landed whole instead of in fragments. I wrote a 400-word client email in about four minutes, which would have taken me closer to twelve at the keyboard.

I also noticed my writing sounded more like me. Less formal, less hedged. When you type, you perform writing. When you speak, you just talk.

The Surprising Parts

I expected to be faster. I didn't expect to feel less tired at the end of the day. By Thursday afternoon I realized I hadn't done my usual mid-afternoon wrist stretch. My shoulders weren't tight. I'd written more than any previous day that week and felt better than a usual Wednesday.

I also started capturing ideas I'd normally lose. Walking to the kitchen, I'd remember something I needed to add to a document. Instead of telling myself I'd remember it later (I wouldn't), I pressed the hotkey, said the thing, and it was in my notes app before I reached the fridge.

What Was Actually Hard

Open-plan awareness is real. I have my own office, so speaking out loud wasn't a problem. If you work in a shared space, voice dictation has limits. A quiet microphone and deliberate low-volume speaking helps, but you will feel self-conscious at first. That fades.

Punctuation is also a small tax. You say "comma" and "period" out loud. It sounds strange for the first hour and then becomes automatic, about as automatic as reaching for the comma key.

Slack was the hardest. Short, punchy messages don't flow naturally as speech. I'd speak a Slack reply and it would come out too long, too conversational. I ended up using dictation to draft the reply, then trimming it. That still saved time, but it was the one place voice didn't feel native.

What I Kept After the Week Ended

I went back to typing code, commands, and anything short and precise. But I haven't typed a long email since. I haven't typed a first draft, a meeting note, or a project brief. Those all come out of my mouth now.

The week changed my baseline. Typing a 500-word document now feels like a strange choice, like using stairs when there's an elevator standing open.

Should You Try It?

Don't commit to a week if that feels like too much. Commit to one morning. Pick the longest thing you need to write that day and speak it instead. Don't edit while you talk. Look at it after.

You'll probably write it faster than you expected. That's usually enough to make you do it again tomorrow.