Day 966 - Might be getting faster at dictation? But still about the same as typing.

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I kept up my dictation streak over the weekend even though I was scheduled to only work on my Hawaii contemporary story on Saturday. I did some blocking for the next scene, which needed a lot of work before I could start writing it.

I also was scheduled to do mostly marketing on Saturday, and I happened to have a lot to do this weekend, so I decided to only do a little work on the Hawaii book (only about the amount of time it took to finish blocking the next scene). I still wanted to keep up my dictation streak and usually try to do at least the bare minimum of 5 minutes, but I didn’t want to do only 5 minutes of dictation on the Hawaii book now when I won’t get back to it until next week Saturday. So instead I did five minutes of dictation on the Regency manuscript, and then I spent the majority of my workday on Saturday on the marketing stuff.

And then on Sunday, I did another 5 minutes of dictation on my Regency manuscript, just to keep up my writing and dictation streaks.

Today, I woke up with an IBS flare-up, but since I still had lots of time-sensitive marketing stuff to do, I decided to do that first while I waited until I felt better. I thought I’d only do the bare minimum of dictation later today, but I ended up doing 80 minutes and finishing the scene I was working on.

I thought that my dictation was very slow at the beginning, probably because I hadn’t bothered to do any dictation exercises before starting. I had wanted to make sure to get my writing done while I was feeling better, just in case the IBS flared up again later. I probably should have just done a dictation exercise.

However, when I transcribed the dictation, my dictation speed wasn’t as slow as I had thought—it was about 2300 words per hour. Unfortunately, I also already know I’ll have a lot of cleanup editing to do on it later because I made a lot of notes to myself on things I need to add to earlier parts of the chapter.

I was going to do the cleanup editing tonight also, but then my IBS flared up again rather badly this time, and I decided to stop there.

So maybe it’s possible my dictation is getting faster despite what I think? I have a feeling that all the time I spent practicing dictation before (not just this current 21 day streak) may have been helping me to get more used to it? I’m still not as fast as I’d like to be—my stretch goal is to be able to dictate at 4000 words an hour—but it might be possible for me to slowly get faster as I get more accustomed to it. I barely pay attention when I dictate commas and periods, although I sometimes still skip quotation marks.

Right now, when I take into account the time for cleanup editing, I’m still about the same as when I type to write, but I consistently take about the same amount of time doing cleanup as I did dictation. So a little faster dictation speed means a little faster overall writing speed.

I guess I’ll just have to look at my dictation speed in the coming days and see if I improve.

Writing streak: 445 days

Dictation streak: 21 days

My takeaway for today: I might be getting faster at dictation, or at least more accustomed to it, which means I might be able to reach my stretch dictation speed goal.

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