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

I gave myself a simple rule for seven days: no typing unless I absolutely had to enter a password or write code. Everything else, every email, every document, every Slack message, every journal entry, had to be dictated.

I expected to feel slower. I didn't expect to feel different.

Day One Was Uncomfortable

The first morning was rough. I sat down to write a client email and reached for the keyboard out of pure reflex. Caught myself, pulled my hands back, and started talking instead.

The email came out fine. Better than fine, actually. It sounded like me. Normally I edit client emails three or four times trying to get the tone right. This one I said once, cleaned up two words, and sent it.

But talking to my computer in my apartment felt absurd. I kept my voice low, as if someone might hear me being productive.

By Day Three, I Stopped Noticing

The self-consciousness disappeared faster than I expected. By Wednesday I was pacing around my apartment dictating a product brief, gesturing at nothing, and I realized I hadn't thought about the process at all. I was just thinking.

My word count for that day was 3,400 words. My usual daily output for writing-heavy days is around 1,500. I wasn't trying to go faster. I just wasn't stopping to fix typos, backspace through bad sentences, or lose my place scrolling back up the page.

I used VoiceInk for most of it. Press a key, talk, release. The text dropped straight into whatever I had open. No app-switching, no dictation interface to manage. It got out of the way, which is exactly what you want.

What Got Harder

A few things genuinely didn't work well.

Short, precise inputs were awkward. Typing a file name or a URL is faster than dictating it. Search queries were hit or miss. Anything requiring special characters or specific formatting took extra steps.

I also found that noisy environments became more of a problem. A coffee shop that would have been fine for typing was harder when I needed to speak clearly. I ended up staying home more, which wasn't the goal but wasn't entirely unwelcome either.

What Got Surprisingly Better

Email was the biggest win. I write a lot of email, and it has always felt like a tax on my time. Dictating replies made them faster to write and, based on responses I got, warmer to read. People kept saying I seemed unusually clear and direct that week. I was just talking the way I talk.

Journaling changed completely. I've kept an inconsistent journal for years, always stopping because writing by hand or typing felt slow relative to how much I wanted to capture. Dictating removed that friction. I logged 600 to 800 words every evening that week without it feeling like work.

And my hands felt noticeably better by Friday. I have some chronic tension in my right forearm from years of mouse and keyboard use. By the end of the week it had quieted down in a way that a weekend off never quite managed.

Would I Do It Again

I'm still dictating most of my writing. Not all of it, and I didn't expect to replace typing entirely. But for first drafts, long emails, notes, and anything where I need to get a complete thought out of my head and into a document, speaking is now my default.

The experiment worked because it forced me past the awkward early stage. If I had tried dictation casually, I probably would have given up after one uncomfortable session.

If you're curious whether it works for you, don't try it once. Give it three days minimum. By then the habit starts to form, and the tool stops feeling like a tool.