The Year I Mostly Stopped Typing
I am, at my core, a keyboard person. I have opinions about keyboards. I have multiple keyboards. I have a post drafted in my head, probably for this journal someday, about my entire typing journey, from the Underwood Pica to an IBM Selectric to the mechanical boards I currently obsess over. This is not that post.
This post is about the year I stopped typing. Mostly.
About a year ago I made a deliberate switch: when working with AI tools, I would dictate instead of type. That decision ran against every instinct I had. I am the person who believes that good thinking lives in the fingers. Typing feels like thinking to me. The rhythm of it, the resistance of the keys, the particular satisfaction of a sentence clicking into place. And yet.
AI work is not really writing, at least not at first. It is conversation. You are not composing a document, you are steering a machine through a dialogue, adjusting, redirecting, elaborating. And when I finally saw it that way, sitting at the keyboard started to feel like driving with oven mitts on. You can do it. But why?
Talking is just faster. Not a little faster. A lot faster. With SuperWhisper, the friction of getting words from head to screen dropped to nearly nothing. I just talk. The words appear. I adjust. The machine responds.
What I found over the year surprised me, though. I did not abandon typing. I could not. But it went somewhere specific. When I sit down to actually write, to craft a sentence, to find the exact word, to do the work I would call real writing, my hands go to the keyboard. That is still where the prose lives. Dictation handles the volume. Typing handles the craft.
The split landed somewhere around ninety percent spoken, ten percent typed. And the ten percent is doing the work that matters most to me.
I do not think typing lost. I think it got demoted to the one job where it was always best: making something that is supposed to sound like something. Everything else, the prompts, the instructions, the long tangential explanations of what I am trying to build and why, that all happens in my voice now. Literally.
To put that word count in perspective: a third of a million words is roughly three or four full-length books. I apparently talked my way through a small shelf this year without noticing.
One day I will write the love letter to the keyboard, and it is going to be genuinely embarrassing how much I have to say. But today’s post is more modest. It is the receipts from a year of walking around my house talking to myself, professionally. The numbers are in the table below.
The first year, by the numbers
| Metric | Year One |
|---|---|
| Words spoken to the machine | ~333,000 (≈ 3–4 full-length books) |
| Total dictations recorded | ~4,200 |
| Hours spent talking, not typing | 27+ |
| Speaking pace | 158 WPM (≈ 4× my typing) |
| Share of computer work now dictated | ~90% |
| Still typed by hand | Creative writing only |
| Tool | SuperWhisper |