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

I am a fast typist. Around 90 words per minute on a good day, which I used to think made the whole dictation conversation irrelevant to me. Speed wasn't my problem. Then I developed a twinge in my right wrist that my doctor called "early-stage repetitive strain" and suggested I take seriously. So I did something dramatic: I decided not to type for a week. Everything I could dictate, I would dictate.

This is what actually happened.

Day One Was Embarrassing

I dictated my first email out loud and immediately felt ridiculous. I live alone, so there was no one to witness it, but I still lowered my voice like someone might hear. The email took twice as long as usual because I kept second-guessing myself mid-sentence.

The words also came out differently than they do when I type. Less polished, more conversational. I almost rewrote the whole thing before I stopped and read it again. It was fine. It was actually better, warmer, more like something a human wrote.

Day Three: The Friction Starts to Disappear

By Wednesday I had settled into a rhythm with VoiceInk. Press the key, talk, done. It appeared in whatever app I was using without any copying or pasting. I stopped thinking about the tool and started thinking about the content, which is exactly what you want.

I dictated a 600-word article in about twelve minutes. That's the speaking time alone, not counting the light editing pass I did after. My fastest typing speed for a comparable draft is closer to twenty-five minutes, and that's with my hands already warmed up.

What Broke

Code. I write a small amount of code and a larger amount of code-adjacent things, like configuration files and technical notes. Dictating variable names and file paths is genuinely painful. I ended up keeping my keyboard nearby for anything technical and just dictating around those parts.

Also, open offices would be a problem. I work from home so this wasn't an issue, but I can see how dictation becomes complicated the moment you share a space. A good headset microphone helps a lot, both for accuracy and for keeping your voice contained.

Day Five: The Wrist Thing

My wrist felt noticeably better by Thursday. Not healed, not dramatic, just quieter. The low-grade ache that I had stopped noticing because it was always there was gone for the first time in months. That alone would have been enough to keep going.

I also noticed I was less tired at the end of writing sessions. There's a physical cost to typing that you don't register until you stop doing it. Your shoulders, your forearms, the muscles around your eyes from leaning toward the screen. An hour of dictation felt lighter than an hour of typing.

What Surprised Me Most

The quality of my first drafts went up. Not down, as I expected from the reduced precision. Up. I think it's because talking forces you to commit to a thought before you've had time to water it down. You can't hover over a sentence while dictating. You say it and move on, and the momentum carries you somewhere more honest.

I also stopped starting sentences with "I" as often, because spoken language naturally varies its rhythm in a way that typed language, at least my typed language, tends not to.

After the Week Ended

I went back to some typing. Mostly for short messages, edits, and anything technical. But dictation became my default for first drafts, long emails, and any writing session where I'm trying to get ideas out of my head and into a document.

The week I intended as a recovery experiment turned into a permanent change in how I work.

If your wrist has been bothering you, or if you're curious what your writing sounds like when you actually talk it out, a week is not a long time to find out.