New / Old Tool

I’m going to test out an old/new tool again. I had tried using voice to text previously and one of the things that slowed me down was always the amount of time that it took to edit these things.  There’s no way to actually say, “hey that’s the end of a sentence”. The Voice to Text tool will actually spell out the word. Punctuation is the bane of voice to text. Pauses are not recognized.

Interestingly enough I think someone complained about that and if you pause long enough you can actually say. and get that actual result (see how that worked right there?)

I’m going to try this again. I can speak faster than I can type. The real question is how much editing do I need to do when all is said and done. I think it will be an interesting experiment. It will force me to look at the words that I create in a much more conversational format as well as giving them something of a flow that they might not have otherwise.

Maybe I get these stories, these words, these things to come crashing together faster and hope the editing process is easy. Maybe I get results that amount to a stream of consciousness that don’t really work out as good stories. Hopefully one of the things that I can do is make this stream of consciousness thing work for me and use my ability to tell a good story to actually create a good story on a page. Typing in this way, which isn’t really typing, I suppose I should at least be able to pull together words faster and more completely than I could do in a traditional typing manner. If I’m lucky I will be able to produce more, and do it more quickly.

I think this is going to be at least, in part, something that I’m going to have to learn and I’m going to have to spend time working with. Based on an articleI read recently, it was suggested that what I really need to do is learn to live with an absolutely terrible first draft. I tend to want my story to come out as close to finished as it can right from the start. I don’t like the editing process. Not that I think anyone likes the editing process, the editing process sucks.

This is the test and we’ll see if my production speed goes up. One of the things I really need to get better at is my speed. There are so many things going on that I really need to make the best use of my time and use tools that maybe I wouldn’t have thought were positive or useful or even for me. We’ll see how it goes.

Time to edit this post because I can already see a giant mess.

Do you have any tools that are your favorites? What tools help your productivity?