Focus, Dragon on laptop

I managed to do my writing almost first thing this morning. It took a little longer to make breakfast than usual, and I also wanted to make sure I had all the tea and water I usually have at my desk before I start.

However, I did get a bit distracted while writing, and I wasted a few minutes cleaning off some junk on my desk. I suppose that’s one of the advantages of going out for a walk to dictate and write—there are fewer distractions around. When I dictate in my office, there are distractions everywhere, including my messy desk.

I’m not certain why I was so easily distracted. However, I realized that just because my brain is fresher right after I wake up, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m able to focus better. In fact, I was worse at my focus this morning than yesterday, when it was after dinner.

I don’t know why my focus was worse, and I also didn’t write very long—only about 75 minutes before I felt tired and distracted and decided to stop.

I thought I slept okay, although I’m not feeling all that great today. I still have a lingering cough from getting Covid in early December, but it gets worse when the air quality is poorer, and today I’ve been coughing a lot.

Is it possible that my brain is TOO wired right when I wake up? Well, I think I’ll continue trying to work right after I wake up all next week to see. If I still find myself distracted, then I might try to go back to doing my chores before writing, which would make it about 3 hours after I wake up when I start writing.

Since I didn’t spend much time writing, I decided to spend the rest of the day doing marketing work that needed to be done. I think it was a good call, because my cough got worse. I’m going to try to go to bed early tonight.

Dictation:

It was easier today than yesterday (distractions notwithstanding). I was a bit annoyed because there were more errors because my throat was hoarse from the coughing, so I spent more time editing on my phone. However, after I transferred the text into Scrivener, the editing was super fast and super easy. I had even had several places where I left a note for myself and I had to look up words or research notes, but editing was still very quick—only 15 minutes to edit 75 minutes of dictation. That’s better than yesterday, which was about 24 minutes to edit 45 minutes of dictation. And that is better than what it used to be when I dictated into a voice recorder and transcribed it—editing usually took about the same amount of time as the dictation.

Since I dislike editing and don’t do it very diligently, I think anything that will reduce editing time will improve my productivity overall. My most important goal is to keep the writing quality high.

When I was dictating before, I had Dragon NaturallySpeaking set up on a second, older MacBook Air laptop that was running Parallels for Mac. However, that laptop died (it’s 12 years old) and I haven’t gotten around to taking it in to the Apple Genius Bar to see if they can fix it. I’m not entirely sure if that’s possible—from the messages I was seeing when I opened Activity Monitor, I think the problem was that a fan had crapped out and so the entire thing was overheating.

I considered setting up Dragon and Parallels on my current MacBook Pro, but I’m hesitant for several reasons:

1) Parallels used up SO much memory on my MacBook Air that I practically had to shut down all my other apps just to use it. At the very least, I probably won’t be able to use all of the several apps I currently have open when I write, and I might have to shut a few of them down.

2) Parallels was also a bit buggy.

3) If I put Dragon on my MacBook Air, I could set it up and dictate while standing, but I wouldn’t be able to walk around while dictating like I do with my phone. In order to do that, I’d have to buy a better wired headset with microphone (with a long cord), and those tend to be expensive if they’re high quality. Currently I have a podcasting mic set up, which does a good job with Dragon.

That last reason was the main one why I hesitated to move to dictating directly into my computer. I find that I dictate a lot better when I’m pacing as I walk. I think the movement helps my brain think better. The microphone on my phone is really quite good and my dictation into Dragon Anywhere isn’t bad by any means.

I think I would have better accuracy with Dragon NaturallySpeaking on my computer, though, so maybe I do need to try to get a headset to use. I also worry about how much memory Parallels is going to take on my MacBook Pro, but since I haven’t loaded it onto this computer yet, I might be wrong and it won’t take up as much memory as I think it will.

I guess I’ll try to get Dragon back on my computer.