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

I decided on a Monday morning that I would not type anything I did not have to. Emails, documents, notes, Slack messages, anything that could be dictated would be dictated. I gave myself one exception: code and terminal commands, because I am not a masochist.

By Wednesday I was a convert. By Friday I was evangelical about it. Here is the honest version of how that week went.

Day One: Mostly Awkward

The first morning was uncomfortable. I kept stopping mid-sentence because I was self-conscious, even though I was alone in my apartment. There is something about speaking to a computer that feels performative in a way typing does not.

I also had to learn to stop editing while I spoke. Typing lets you backspace constantly. Speaking does not, and fighting that instinct took most of the first day. I said things like "no wait, actually" out loud into VoiceInk, which produced exactly the text "no wait actually" and reminded me to think before I spoke.

Output on day one was slower than typing. I am estimating, but probably by 20 percent.

Day Two and Three: The Shift

By Tuesday afternoon something clicked. I stopped trying to compose while speaking and started just speaking. The sentences came out rougher but faster, and the editing I did afterward was lighter than I expected.

I wrote a 900-word article on Tuesday in just under 25 minutes from first word to finished draft. My usual time for that length is closer to 50 minutes. The draft needed a cleanup pass, but not a painful one.

On Wednesday I dictated a thread of six emails that had been sitting in my inbox for four days. I had been avoiding them because they felt effortful. Speaking them took eleven minutes total. I do not know if they were better emails, but they were done.

What Actually Broke

Two things did not work well. Short, precise text, things like filling in a form, writing a subject line, or typing a URL, was faster to type. The cognitive overhead of switching to dictation for three words was not worth it.

The other failure was noisy environments. I tried dictating notes at a coffee shop on Thursday and the accuracy dropped noticeably. A headset would have helped. I did not have one with me.

The Surprise

I expected to produce more words. I did not expect them to be better words.

My spoken drafts were less formal and more direct. Sentences were shorter. I used fewer qualifiers. A colleague read one of my dictated articles and said it sounded more like me than my usual writing. I had not told her about the experiment.

I think what happened is that speaking bypassed whatever internal editor makes me write in a slightly stiff, slightly cautious register. The voice on the page was closer to the voice in my head.

What I Kept After the Week

I did not go fully voice-only after the experiment ended. That was never the point. What I kept was a habit of dictating first drafts of anything over 300 words, and dictating emails that require more than two sentences.

I also kept the practice of not editing while speaking. That one transferred back to typing. I draft faster now even when I am using a keyboard, because I trained myself to get words down before second-guessing them.

VoiceInk stayed on my menu bar. I press the key, I talk, the words appear. Some days I use it for an hour. Some days I barely use it at all. But it is there for the moments when my hands feel like the slowest part of the process.

If you have been curious about voice dictation but kept finding reasons to put it off, one week is enough to know whether it fits how you work. The awkward part does not last long.