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

I type fast. Around 90 words per minute on a good day, faster when I am angry or caffeinated. I never thought I had a typing problem. Then my right wrist started aching in a specific way, a dull burn that appeared after lunch and stayed until morning. My doctor said it was early-stage repetitive strain. She told me to reduce keyboard time.

I decided to go further. One week, no typing unless absolutely necessary. Everything I could do by voice, I would do by voice.

Day One: Humbling

The first hour was embarrassing and I was alone. I kept stopping mid-sentence because I did not know how to say a comma. I would trail off, look at the screen, and realize I had dictated three words and then narrated my own hesitation. "And then, um, the thing is, no wait."

I set up VoiceInk because I needed something fast. No lag, no sending audio to a server, no waiting. When you are already frustrated, latency makes it worse. At least when I spoke, the text appeared immediately.

By the afternoon of day one, I had written about 600 words and deleted 400 of them. Normal typing day: 2,000 words, no problem.

Day Three: Something Shifted

I stopped trying to dictate the way I type. Typing is precise. You commit to one word, then the next. Dictation works better in phrases. I started speaking in longer arcs, trusting that the transcription would catch up.

It did. I also stopped treating every awkward sentence as a failure. I started saying "scratch that" and moving on, the way you would in a conversation. The document got messier, but it got longer.

On day three I wrote 2,200 words before noon. More than my usual full-day count.

Day Five: Emails Got Easier

I had been dreading email. Short-form writing felt harder to dictate, too many proper nouns, too much back-and-forth. But by mid-week I had a system. I would say the whole email out loud in one pass, including punctuation, then do one quick read-through before sending.

It took less time than typing. Not because dictation is faster in a pure words-per-minute sense, though it is, but because I stopped agonizing over phrasing. Speaking feels lower-stakes than writing. You just say the thing.

Day Seven: The 4,000-Word Afternoon

I had a long piece due. I sat down at 1pm, opened a blank document, pressed the shortcut, and talked for three hours. I got up twice, once for water, once to walk around when a section felt stuck.

I dictated 4,200 words. The draft was rougher than my typed drafts. It had redundancies, tangents, places where I clearly lost the thread and found it again. But it was all there. Every idea I had that afternoon made it onto the page because nothing was fast enough to catch it.

Editing that draft took about an hour. Total time to finished piece: four hours. My previous record for that length was closer to nine.

What I Kept After the Week

I went back to typing. My wrist needed a mix, not total abstinence. But I kept voice dictation for first drafts, for long emails, and for any day when my hands feel tired.

The experiment taught me that my bottleneck was never speed. It was the friction of translating thought into keystroke. Dictation removes most of that friction. The ideas flow differently when your mouth is the output device, less filtered, more honest, and often more interesting.

If you have ever felt stuck staring at a blank page, try talking at it instead. You might be surprised what comes out.