Hilarious effort at productivity hack #1

So People of LinkedIn. I've decided to try dictation software following on from the challenge of one of our fantastic participants in a webinar.  This courageous individual was battling the aftereffects of a stroke. And here I was challenging the whole group to use touch typing in order to improve the speed and effectiveness of their work.  Yet I myself, as we often do find was living in the past. I'm now the middle age dinosaur. The QWERTY keyboard was designed in 1874. Touch typing is old-fashioned.  Why would I learn to use a keyboard when I could sit and speak directly into Microsoft Word or my Apple iOs system at a rate of knots akin to a carbon, trimaran foil yacht flying across the seas in a strong wind? Totally unfettered.

Tomorrow I'm going to be sitting down with two extraordinary people to begin writing a book on human performance.  As I sit with them I'm no doubt going to be asking for some very high speed and intense word counts. The word count is a strange goal.  Yet if you were to delve into the most wonderful book by Timothy Galway (The Inner Game of Work) you would find he encourages us all to find neutral critical variables on which to focus in order to get our best performance.  A neutral critical variable is a variable we can think about that actually distracts our conscious mind from the task in hand and allows us to in allows us to enter into a state of flow so famously described by Russian performance psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

As I dictate my wife is laughing in the background, having rushed into the room due to my new and unusual “work voice” (the unspoken joy of homeworking, it turns out, is loving marital ridicule. I should mention that my second microphone stand of lockdown also arrived today. Any teasing fully is warranted). The washing machine of our small suburban office which doubles as a laundry room is in full flow, and my distracting ukulele's sits by my desk yet here I am hands free dictating a rate of knots in my usual inimitable style. I might even write a song.  I’m fearful of who I may become!

I'm fearful that once released into this new world I might be as productive as a ninja, as free flowing as a hang glider pilot soaring above the clouds liberated from earthly gravity.  My hands barely know what to do. Yet I'm encouraged by what I was challenged to do yesterday and here I am 10 minutes later with 344 words pouring onto my Word document, not all of them perfect but probably a 90 or 95% standard.

So far my learnings

1.    Seems pretty easy.

2.    Far too long sentences .

3.    Need to get to grips with punctuation

4.    Probably waffling

5.    Quite enjoying it

6.    Is this the future, I don't know!

It's actually quite fun stop. Delete previous word stop dictation. (Can you hear the reason for my wife’s laughter echoing in this text?!)