I Stopped Typing for a Week. Here Is What Happened.

I gave myself a rule on a Monday morning: no typing unless absolutely necessary. Navigation, passwords, code, fine. But any time I needed to produce words, I would speak them instead. I had been curious about dictation for a while and kept putting it off. Seven days felt like enough time to either prove it or kill it.

By Friday, I had written more than I had in any week that year.

Day One: Awkward and Slow

The first morning was rough. I sat down to reply to emails and felt immediately self-conscious. Speaking sentences out loud felt performative, even alone in my apartment. I kept stopping mid-sentence, second-guessing my phrasing in a way I never do when typing.

The accuracy was fine. I was using VoiceInk, which transcribed locally on my Mac without any lag, and it got almost everything right. The problem was me. I was not used to committing to words before I saw them on screen.

I sent six emails that morning. It took longer than usual, but only because I was adjusting.

Day Three: Something Shifted

By Wednesday, the self-consciousness was mostly gone. I had stopped mentally composing sentences before speaking them and started just talking. The transcription kept up. Errors were rare enough that I had stopped anticipating them.

I wrote a 900-word article draft that afternoon in about 25 minutes. Normally that draft would take me an hour, including all the stopping and starting and deleting and rewriting that typing seems to invite. Dictating did not give me time to second-guess. I moved forward instead of sideways.

My hands, which usually ached by midday, felt fine.

The Unexpected Part

I expected to write faster. I did not expect to write better, at least not in first draft form. But the drafts I dictated that week were closer to what I actually wanted to say. Less hedged, less tangled. When you are typing, it is easy to write yourself into a complicated sentence and then keep building on top of it rather than starting over. When you are speaking, you tend to finish a thought and move on.

A colleague who read one of my dictated pieces said it felt more direct than my usual work. I had not told her about the experiment.

What Did Not Work

Detailed editing by voice is not natural, at least not yet. Restructuring a paragraph, moving a sentence three lines up, adjusting a single word in the middle of a block of text, all of that was slower by voice than by keyboard. I ended up doing a hybrid: dictate the draft, edit with keyboard and mouse.

That turned out to be a reasonable workflow, not a compromise. The drafting phase is where most of the time and mental energy goes anyway.

I also found open-plan offices would make this approach complicated. I was home all week, which helped. If you share a workspace, you would need headphones and some tolerance from the people around you.

The End of the Week

By Friday I had written around 12,000 words across articles, emails, notes, and a project brief. That is about twice my usual weekly output. My wrists had not complained once.

I did not stop typing after the experiment ended. I still use the keyboard for editing, coding, and anything short enough that switching modes is not worth it. But for any writing that needs to go somewhere, a draft, an explanation, a long reply, I start by talking now.

The keyboard is still useful. It is just no longer the default.

If you have been curious about dictation but keep putting it off, a week is all it takes to find out whether it works for you. The answer might surprise you.