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

I set one rule at the start: for seven days, I would reach for my voice before I reached for my keyboard. Emails, notes, drafts, Slack messages. If I could say it, I had to say it first. Only formatting, code, and passwords were exempt.

I expected to feel awkward. I did not expect to feel faster.

Day One: The Awkward Part

The first morning was strange. I had a reply to write and I sat there, hands hovering, before remembering the rule. I pressed the shortcut in VoiceInk, spoke the reply, and watched it appear in my email draft. It took maybe twelve seconds. I would have spent two minutes typing and editing the same thing.

But it felt weird. Speaking out loud in a quiet apartment, even alone, carries a kind of self-consciousness. I kept my sentences shorter than I wanted. I stumbled on a few words. I second-guessed whether I was being clear.

By mid-afternoon, most of that was gone.

Day Three: The Volume Surprised Me

By Wednesday I was generating more text than usual without trying harder. My daily notes were longer. My draft for an article I had been avoiding was suddenly 800 words in a single sitting, largely because talking made it easier to push past the internal editor that usually slows me down.

When you type, every sentence sits on the screen as you write it. You can see the bad ones. With voice, the words keep moving and you deal with the mess later. For first drafts, this is a genuine advantage.

I also noticed I was capturing things I would normally have let slip. An idea during lunch. A follow-up I thought of while making coffee. I could just say it into VoiceInk and it would land in my notes app without me sitting down.

Day Five: The Things That Did Not Work

Not everything is better by voice. Writing anything with precise structure, lists, code snippets, tables, still needs hands. I found myself doing an awkward hybrid where I would dictate the content and then switch to keyboard to format it.

Slack was harder than email. Short punchy messages feel unnatural to dictate, and the platform's informal tone made spoken words land slightly stiff. I cheated on Slack more than anywhere else.

I also had one video call where I forgot I had set VoiceInk to a global shortcut, and briefly transcribed ten seconds of a colleague's sentence into a document I had open. Nothing went anywhere sensitive, but I got more careful about context after that.

Day Seven: The Number That Stuck With Me

I did a rough count of my word output on an average pre-experiment day versus an average day that week. The experiment days ran about 40 percent higher, and this was not a week I was trying to write more. I was just removing one layer of friction.

My hands also felt noticeably less tired by evening. I did not have RSI going in, but I do get that low-grade tension in my forearms after long writing days. It was quieter that week.

What I Kept After the Week Ended

I went back to typing for things that need it. But I kept voice for first drafts, for long emails, for anything where I know what I want to say but haven not said it yet. The shortcut is still set. I still use it every day.

The experiment did not make me a voice-only person. It made me someone who no longer defaults to the keyboard out of habit when talking would be faster.

That shift, from habit to intention, is the part worth trying. Even one week of paying attention to when your hands are the bottleneck will change how you think about input.

You do not have to commit to anything permanent. Try seven days and see what the number looks like.