When typing is better than talking

I’m a heavy user of voice-to-text. It’s a key part of my workflow, and it improves my productivity — but only about sixty percent of the time. Lower than I expected when I first started using it.

Here’s what I’ve realized. Voice-to-text improves the efficiency with which I get an idea down. But that’s only a gain when the bottleneck is the speed of capture. A lot of the time, the bottleneck is actually the thinking itself — and the act of typing, with its slight slowness, gives me the time to process. In those moments, voice offers no efficiency gain.

This points to something broader about any system or tool. An improvement only counts if it’s an improvement to the actual constraint.

Optimize anything else and it doesn’t really matter.