Dictating burnout

I turned 50 recently and my body is giving me very clear signals that it’s had enough. Burnout is physical and it’s brutal.

My arms in particular are suffering from a repetitive strain injury. And who can blame them? I spend the majority of my day tap tap tapping away on my computer keyboard, writing and replying to emails, and a wealth of other so-called “productive” activities. Why wouldn’t they get angry?

As a result, I did what everyone who suffers from repetitive strain injury does – I minimised the activity which caused the pain.

This had two immediate effects. One was that my emails became very brief, which is not such a bad thing. The second impact was that I gave up writing altogether. As you can imagine, this has been terrible for my creative brain, not to mention my writing output.

I attended a recent writing workshop where the presenter made a case for dictating your memoir. She argued that seven hours of talking equals 50,000 words. At first I thought the process was implausible, but she brought out book after book as evidence that this process was working for the majority of her clients.

By the end of the workshop, I was convinced to give it a go. My arms might have given up on me, but for now my brain and mouth work just fine.

However, I am impatient and her technique involved recording audio and sending it away for transcription. I added my own refinement to the process which involves opening a word processing app, pushing the little…