I spoke this article, too

You may have seen the recent article: I didn’t write this column, I spoke it, in the New York Times.

Well, I spoke this article, too. 

In fact, I’ve been dictating most of my ideas for a while now, and with audio transcriptions being pretty good these days, I’ve managed to shorten my idea-to-published workflow both in terms of time spent and steps taken. 

So here’s a few thoughts on why you might want to start speaking your articles and see whether the same will work for you.

Why would you want to speak instead of write?

It’s liberating 

There's something liberating about dictating with your voice rather than typing with your fingers.

I dictated the outline of this piece while walking back from work. It was a warm, clear day. I know that because I had my head up and could take-in my surroundings, rather than have my head down and buried in my phone.

It’s quicker

The speed of taking down an idea with your voice is one of the reasons why I've managed to increase the number of articles published on the VUX World blog.

Rather than loosing the idea in the moment, or breaking your train of thought while you slow your brain down to the pace of your fingers, if you dictate your ideas, you can just let fly. 

It’s easier

Because you can dictate while doing something else, there’s less cognitive load in the process.

Having to think about typing while you’re thinking about what you want to type means that your brain is having to do two things at once. Then you might have the challenge of typing on a phone with a small keypad.

Typing in general increases your cognitive load in comparison to speaking. 

Keep your flow

Usually, when writing, the first pass is a brain-dump. You’re not thinking about being neat, you’re just throwing your ideas down to be tidied up later.

However, you sometimes can’t help but get caught dwelling on something. All the while you’re dwelling or reworking that one bit, you’re breaking the flow and loosing your rhythm. You might even loose your train of thought and loose inspiration.

If you’re speaking, you can let your brain run without getting caught up on the detail and loosing your flow.

The process

So how do you do it? How do you use your voice as a starting point for writing?

In the New York Times article, the author (or speaker) Farhad Manjoo, writes (or speaks) about his creative and production process, which involved taking an audio recording on RecUp, then putting that into Descript to transcribe the audio, and then pulling that into a word processor to tidy it up before publishing.

My workflow is similar, but slightly leaner. 

I use Otter. It’s an app that lets you take a voice notes, but it transcribes your audio as you speak in real time.

You can then grab the text from the app, copy it into Evernote (or whatever you use) and finalise it there.

Then, you can publish. 

Using Otter takes out the need to pull down audio files and import them into another piece of software. Without Otter, you'd need two devices: a phone to take the dictation and a laptop to do the transcribing. 

With a combination of Otter, Evernote and Wordpress, I can take down an idea, dot the Ts and cross the Is, then publish it, all on my phone.

Now all I need is for Otter to release and Alexa skill so I can remove the need to mess around with my phone to kick off the process.

That'll be a game changer.

Note: I’m not being paid by Otter to promote that product, at all. It’s genuinely just what I use and it’s too good not to share.