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

I typed my first line of code at eleven years old and haven't stopped since. Keyboards feel natural to me in a way that is hard to explain to people who don't spend their days in text editors. So when I decided to go one full week without typing, I expected it to feel like a punishment.

It mostly didn't.

Day One: The Awkward Part

The first morning was rough, but not for the reason I expected. The technology worked fine. VoiceInk transcribed accurately and fast enough that I wasn't watching a cursor blink. The awkward part was me. I kept stopping mid-sentence to mentally edit, the same way I do when typing. That habit has nothing to do with keyboards. It's just how I write.

I also noticed I was whispering. Not because I needed to, but because speaking to a computer felt strange in a way that took a day or two to shake.

Day Three: Something Clicked

By Wednesday I stopped thinking about the process. I would open a document, press the shortcut, and just talk. Emails went out faster. My meeting notes were more complete because I could capture thoughts in real time without hunting for keys.

The biggest surprise was length. My first drafts were getting longer, not in a padded way, but in a more complete way. Ideas that I would normally cut for the sake of typing effort were making it onto the page. I was saying things I usually only half-said.

What Actually Broke

Passwords. Passwords were a complete disaster and I ended up typing those by hand without guilt.

Code was also a sticking point. Dictating prose is natural. Dictating a function name like getUserSessionToken is not. I ended up using voice for comments and documentation and typing the actual code. That split workflow turned out to be fine.

Another problem: open offices. I work from home, so this didn't affect me much, but I tried dictating from a coffee shop on Thursday and gave up after ten minutes. Background noise, self-consciousness, and the general weirdness of narrating a project proposal in public made it impractical.

Day Five: The Ergonomic Surprise

I did not start this experiment for health reasons. But by Friday I noticed something: my shoulders weren't tight at the end of the day. My wrists felt fine. I hadn't thought about either thing in years because I'd normalized the tension.

Five days of dramatically reduced typing was apparently enough to feel a difference. That alone made me want to continue beyond the week.

What the Word Count Looked Like

I tracked output loosely. In a normal week I produce roughly 8,000 words across all formats: emails, documents, notes, drafts. That week I produced just over 11,000. I wasn't trying to write more. I just wasn't stopping as often.

Some of that extra output was noise, things I'd have cut anyway. But a meaningful chunk of it was good material I would have otherwise trimmed before it reached the page.

What I Kept Afterward

I didn't stop typing. I use a keyboard for anything that benefits from precision: code, commands, short replies, anything where voice would add friction instead of removing it.

But for first drafts, long emails, meeting notes, and any writing where the goal is getting thought onto the page, I kept dictating. It's been several months now and the habit stuck in a way that surprised me.

If You're Curious

You don't need to commit to a full week. Try one afternoon. Pick the task you write most often and do it by voice instead. The first hour feels strange. The second hour feels normal. By the end of the day you'll have a data point that's actually yours.

That's more useful than anything I can tell you here.