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

I am a fast typist. Around 85 words per minute on a good day, which I always considered an asset. So when I decided to spend a week dictating everything I normally would have typed, I expected to feel slower and frustrated. I was half right.

Monday: The Awkward Phase

The first morning was rough. I sat down to write a newsletter section, pressed the key to start VoiceInk, and then just sat there with my mouth open. I had been typing for so long that I did not actually know how I started sentences anymore. I just started them.

Speaking felt performative, like I was dictating a letter to a secretary in 1987. I kept stopping to clear my throat. I over-enunciated. My first dictated paragraph sounded like a press release.

But I kept going because that is the deal I made with myself.

Tuesday and Wednesday: The Friction Shifts

By Tuesday afternoon, something changed. I stopped thinking about the act of speaking and started just talking. The self-consciousness faded, probably because I ran out of energy to maintain it.

I noticed I was writing longer sentences. Not bad-longer, just more complete. I was finishing thoughts I would normally have trimmed for the sake of my fingers. An email I expected to take ten minutes took four, and it was better than usual.

Wednesday I dictated a 900-word article draft in about 25 minutes. I know that because I timed it. I would normally spend 45 minutes on a draft that length, and I would procrastinate for another 15 before starting.

The Unexpected Problem

By Thursday I had a new problem: I was generating too much raw material. Dictation is fast enough that the bottleneck moved from output to editing. I had more draft than I needed and had to cut more than usual.

This sounds like a complaint but it is not. Editing too much is a better problem than having too little to work with. A sparse draft has nowhere to go. An overfull one just needs a knife.

What I Could Not Dictate

Some things stayed on the keyboard. Passwords, obviously. Code. Anything requiring precise formatting I needed to see as I wrote it. Short replies where pulling up VoiceInk felt like overkill, though I started doing even those by voice by Thursday and found it fine.

Subject lines were weird to dictate. One sentence, very deliberate, and I kept second-guessing word choice in a way I do not when typing. Titles and headlines stayed awkward all week.

Friday: The Number That Surprised Me

I tracked my word output loosely across the week. Not scientific, but enough to see a pattern. My daily writing average went from roughly 1,200 words to just over 2,100. That is across everything: articles, emails, notes, Slack messages I dictated while pacing around my apartment.

More interesting than the volume was the fatigue. By Friday afternoon, my hands felt fine. Normally by end of week I have some tension in my right forearm that I have learned to ignore. This week I forgot to notice it because it was not there.

After the Week Ended

I did not go back to typing everything. I write first drafts by voice now almost always. Emails longer than three sentences get dictated. Notes get dictated. Status updates get dictated.

I still type. Code, short messages, anything requiring precision. But my default changed, and the keyboard is now one tool among several rather than the only one.

The awkward phase on Monday was real. But it lasted less than two days, and what came after was a faster, less painful way to write.

If you have ever thought about trying voice dictation and kept putting it off, one week is enough to know whether it works for you. The first day is the hardest part.