I Became The Bluetooth Headset Tosser So You Don't Have To
This "Productivity Hack" Cost Me Hours Of My Life (And Made Everything Worse)
There used to be a specific type of person you’d see on the train, circa 2007. Always a bloke in a suit, always pacing up and down the carriage despite there being seats available, always speaking far too loudly into a Bluetooth headset that made him look like he’d glued half a stapler to his ear. He’d be “closing deals” or “touching base” or engaging in some other form of business bollocks, completely oblivious to the fact that everyone around him wanted to throw him under the next passing freight train.
I spent years smugly judging those people. Look at that tosser, I’d think, while typing furiously into my BlackBerry. Can’t even sit still long enough to have a proper conversation. Probably hasn’t had a coherent thought in weeks.
When I Became The Bluetooth Tosser
Which makes it particularly galling that I’ve now become one of them.
Not with the suit, thankfully, or the pacing, or the aggressive networking nonsense. But I have spent the last three mumbling into a microphone instead of typing, convinced I’d discovered some brilliant productivity hack that would transform how I work. The theory was simple: I can speak at 150 words per minute but only type at 60, therefore speaking to an AI must be twice as efficient. Maths doesn’t lie, yeah?
Except maths can absolutely lie when you’re measuring the wrong thing.
The Great Voice Dictation Delusion
This is what happened when I went “voice-first” for six months. I did get more words out faster. Significantly faster. I could ramble through an entire article’s worth of material in about ten minutes, watch Claude or ChatGPT clean it up, and feel incredibly smug about my futuristic workflow.
The problem was that 80% of what came out of my mouth was verbal diarrhea that I wouldn’t have written down if I’d been typing. When you type, there’s a natural filtering process. You see the words forming, you pause, you think “actually, that’s bollocks,” and you delete it before it becomes permanent. When you’re speaking, especially when you’re speaking quickly, you just produce an unedited stream of consciousness that ranges from “vaguely coherent” to “what was I even talking about?”
The AI would dutifully clean it up, sure. It would add punctuation, fix the grammar, remove the stammering bits where I’d lost my train of thought. But cleaning up a ramble is not the same as producing something well-crafted. It’s like the difference between a professional chef preparing a meal and someone scraping together a dinner from whatever’s left in the fridge after a long week. Technically edible, but you can taste the compromise in every bite.
The Bandwidth Problem
The “typing is a bottleneck” argument sounds compelling until you realize it’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the bottleneck actually is. Yes, I can speak faster than I can type. But the bottleneck isn’t my fingers. It’s my brain.
Can you think at 150 words per minute? Because I certainly can’t. Good thinking requires pauses, reflection, the occasional moment of staring blankly at the wall while your brain works through a problem. When you’re dictating at speed, you’re not thinking faster, you’re just externalizing your internal monologue and hoping the AI can make sense of it later.
I proved this to myself accidentally one afternoon when I was trying to explain a concept. Typed version: took me forty minutes, came out clear and logical. Dictated version: took me eight minutes, came out as a rambling mess that required another thirty minutes of editing to make remotely useful. Net result: I’d actually saved negative two minutes, plus I’d given myself a headache from talking continuously for eight minutes straight.
The real problem isn’t the interface. It’s the delusion that speed equals productivity. We’ve confused “producing more output” with “producing better output,” which is the same idiot logic that led to every corporate productivity disaster of the last twenty years. More emails doesn’t mean better communication. More meetings doesn’t mean better decisions. And more words per minute doesn’t mean clearer thinking.
Where Voice Actually Works
Right. Having thoroughly roasted the premise, here’s what I actually learned from eighteen months of talking to machines instead of typing to them.
Voice is brilliant for capturing fleeting thoughts. When an idea hits you while you’re doing something else, speaking it into your phone is vastly better than trying to type it one-handed while stirring a pot of pasta. I’ve saved dozens of potentially useful thoughts this way that would have evaporated by the time I found a keyboard. But that’s not a productivity hack, that’s just using your phone as a slightly more sophisticated notepad.
Voice is useful for rough drafting when you’re genuinely stuck. If I’ve been staring at a blank page for twenty minutes, sometimes just rambling through what I’m trying to say will unstick my brain. The dictated version is always rubbish, but it gives me something to edit rather than nothing to improve. This works maybe one time in ten. The other nine times, I’m just producing a different flavour of nothing.
Voice is terrible for anything requiring precision. Code, technical documentation, anything with specific formatting requirements. Trying to dictate code is like trying to assemble IKEA furniture by describing it over the phone to someone in another country. Technically possible, but so inefficient you’d have been better off just doing it properly in the first place.
The “think while walking” thing is mostly bollocks. Yes, occasionally a good idea will arrive during a walk. But that’s not because walking makes you smarter, it’s because stepping away from a problem sometimes lets your subconscious work on it. Trying to systematically dictate your way through complex problems while wandering around is just ADHD-as-a-service. You’re just producing more material that will need fixing later.
What I actually do now: I use voice dictation for specific, limited purposes. Initial brainstorming sessions where I need to unstick my brain. Capturing thoughts when I’m genuinely away from a keyboard and the idea is urgent enough to matter. The occasional rough draft when I’m feeling blocked and need something, anything, to edit.
But for actual work, the stuff that requires thought, precision, or any level of quality control, I sit down, I type, I edit as I go. Because that’s still the most efficient way to produce something that doesn’t require hours of cleanup afterwards.
The Whisper Nonsense
One last thing. I've seen people advocate for a "whisper setup" where you're barely audible to people in the room while dictating to your AI. If you find yourself whispering to a machine while other humans are present, congratulations, you’ve just found a socially awkward way to look like a pillock.
There’s a reason we evolved to type in offices instead of speaking. It’s because open-plan offices are already insufferable hellscapes of distraction, and adding everyone mumbling to their computers would make it genuinely uninhabitable. The “whisper setup” isn’t the future of work. It’s just finding a slightly quieter way to be the Bluetooth headset bore.
The Truth About Interfaces
The interface isn’t the problem. Your brain is the problem. My brain is the problem. We’re all trying to optimize the wrong variable because it’s easier than admitting that good work requires actual thought, time, and focus, none of which can be solved by speaking slightly faster.
The QWERTY keyboard layout is indeed based on technology from the 1870s. But you know what else is based on old technology? The alphabet. Written language. The entire concept of grammar. We’re not still using these things because we’re trapped by legacy systems. We’re using them because they work, and because changing them would solve problems that don’t actually exist.
Voice dictation has its place. It’s genuinely useful for specific tasks. But treating it as the superior interface for everything is just another form of productivity shite, the endless search for the magic tool that will make you twice as effective without requiring you to actually think twice as hard.
Your fingers aren’t the bottleneck. Your tendency to confuse motion with progress is the bottleneck. And no amount of speaking instead of typing is going to fix that.
I’m going back to my keyboard now. At least when I’m typing, I can see the rubbish before I publish it.