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

I'm a fast typist. Ninety words per minute on a good day, which I used to think meant I didn't need to bother with dictation. Then my right wrist started aching after long writing sessions, and my physical therapist said the words I'd been dreading: cut back on keyboard time. So I tried something drastic. No typing for a week, except for code and commands. Everything else, notes, emails, articles, messages, spoken aloud.

Day One: Slower Than Expected

The first day was humbling. I kept stopping mid-sentence because I wasn't used to committing to words before I could see them. Typing lets you draft and delete in secret. Speaking feels public, even when you're alone in your home office.

I dictated a work email and read it back. It was more direct than anything I would have typed. No weasel phrases, no over-hedging. I sent it anyway. Nobody noticed anything different, which told me the hedging was for me, not for them.

Day Two and Three: The Rhythm Starts

By day two I stopped expecting it to feel like typing. It doesn't. The cadence is different. You can't really pause and think in silence the way you do when your hands are on the keyboard, because silence produces nothing. You have to keep the stream moving.

This turned out to be useful. The pressure to keep talking pushed me through the parts of a draft where I'd normally stall. I talked past my uncertainty and cleaned it up later. Day three, I drafted a 900-word article in about 25 minutes. That included two interruptions and one complete restart of a paragraph.

The Accuracy Surprised Me

I used VoiceInk on my Mac, which transcribes locally without sending anything to the cloud. I was skeptical about accuracy, because I have a mild regional accent and I talk fast. The error rate was lower than I expected. Maybe one or two corrections per 200 words. Proper nouns were the main weak spot, names of tools and people, but everything else landed cleanly.

The corrections themselves were fast. A quick retype of a word, done. It cost less time than I spent fixing my own typos on a normal day.

What I Noticed About My Writing

Mid-week, I reread some of the pieces I'd dictated and compared them to articles I'd typed the previous month. The dictated ones were shorter. Not worse, shorter. Fewer filler phrases. Sentences that moved. I'd apparently been padding things out with words my fingers added automatically.

I also noticed I stopped opening a second browser tab to look something up mid-sentence. When you're talking, you don't want to break the flow, so you leave a placeholder, like "add the stat here" and keep going. That habit alone probably saved 20 minutes a day.

Day Six: The Part I Didn't Expect

I got emotional on day six. I was dictating notes about a personal project, something I'd been procrastinating on for months. Talking through it, out loud, to nobody, I figured out why I'd been stuck. Something about saying the problem instead of writing it made the shape of it clearer.

I don't have a clean explanation for that. It might just be that speaking is less filtered than typing, so the actual thought comes out instead of the managed version of it.

Day Seven: What I Kept

I didn't go fully voice-first after the week ended. I went hybrid. I type code, short replies, and anything that needs precision. I dictate first drafts, meeting notes, emails longer than three sentences, and anything where the goal is to get thinking onto a page quickly.

My wrist improved. My first drafts got longer and looser in a useful way. The editing got easier because there was more raw material to work with.

If you're curious, you don't need a week. Try one morning. Dictate your first three work emails and see what they sound like. The only thing you'll lose is the time you were spending on your keyboard.