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

I didn't do it because my wrists hurt, though they probably should have. I did it because I'd read the words-per-minute statistics one too many times and wanted to know if they were actually true for me, personally, in real work, not a typing test. So I made a rule: for one week, no typing unless absolutely necessary. Every email, every note, every document would be dictated.

Day one was uncomfortable.

The First Day Felt Like Speaking to No One

I kept starting sentences and stopping. Not because I didn't know what to say, but because I wasn't used to saying it out loud to a screen. There's a social performance layer to speaking that typing doesn't have. When you type, the room is quiet. When you dictate, you feel like someone might hear you, even when no one is there.

I pushed through it. By mid-morning, I had drafted three emails that would normally have taken me thirty minutes. They weren't perfect, but neither are my typed first drafts. I cleaned them up in about four minutes total.

By Day Three, I Stopped Noticing

The self-consciousness faded faster than I expected. By Wednesday I was dictating while pacing, which I'd never done while typing for obvious reasons. Moving around seemed to help. The words came easier when I wasn't sitting still.

I was using VoiceInk to drop text directly into whatever app I had open. The workflow was simple: press a key, talk, stop pressing. No new interface to learn. No audio file to upload. The text just appeared. That immediacy mattered more than I anticipated. Any friction would have given me an excuse to reach for the keyboard.

The Output Numbers Were Strange to Look At

I kept a rough log. On a normal typing day, I produce somewhere between 1,200 and 1,800 words of original writing, not counting edits or revisions. During the dictation week, my lowest day was 2,100 words. My highest was a Thursday where I spoke for about ninety minutes across several sessions and ended up with 4,400 words.

Some of those words were rougher than my usual typed drafts. Some were surprisingly cleaner. I think speaking forces a certain commitment to finishing a sentence. When you type, it's easy to stop mid-thought. When you're talking, you tend to follow through.

What I Got Wrong About Dictation

I assumed accuracy would be the main frustration. It wasn't. Modern transcription is good enough that the error rate was low, and the errors that did appear were fast to fix. The real adjustment was learning to punctuate out loud. Saying "comma" or "period" feels robotic at first. After a few days it became automatic, the same way hitting Enter at the end of a line is automatic when typing.

I also assumed I'd miss the keyboard for complex tasks. I did, a little, for things like editing and moving text around. But for generating new writing, which is supposedly the hard part, I didn't miss it at all.

Going Back Felt Slow

At the end of the week I switched back to typing to see how it felt. The answer was: slower, more effortful, and oddly quiet in a way that felt like a loss rather than a relief.

I still type. I use the keyboard constantly for editing, coding, and anything structural. But I haven't gone back to typing first drafts. The week proved something I wouldn't have believed without doing it: the keyboard isn't neutral. It's a constraint I'd just stopped noticing.

If you're curious whether dictation is actually faster for you, don't benchmark it. Just commit to a week. The data you get from your own work will mean more than any study.