Maximizing Your Time: How to Write During Commutes

Time is valuable. The more time we have, the more productive we can be. It’s simple math.

Humans waste a lot of time. And in many cases, it’s not time we can cut. Take sleep for example. While we can certainly limit our amount of sleep, this is something we cannot cut from our lives altogether. We need to sleep. There is no way around that.

But the more time we spend time on things like sleeping or showering, the less time we have to be productive. There are only so many hours in the day after all, and you’re taking time from that finite limit. Again, simple math.

But there are still ways to be productive during many of our traditional “time-wasting” periods. Take, for example, commuting. As someone who commutes between 45 to 90 minutes for work (depending on the time of day), I can find myself in traffic for anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours a day. Multiply that by five or six days each week, you’re looking at a best case scenario of 7.5 hours wasted weekly. That’s basically a full workday, and that’s a best case scenario.

For those of you who follow this blog regularly, you probably recall my experiment when working on the book, Cassidy. For those of you unfamiliar, the experiment was to write an entire book exclusively during commutes. In the end, it was a big success! Cassidy has since grown to be one of my best reviewed books on Amazon.

When writing Cassidy, I was taking public transportation and was therefore able to sit down and write on my mobile tablet. Now I have a new job which takes me far out of the city and public transportation is no longer an option for me. Therefore, I have to drive. Like many of you who may drive to work each day, I initially thought this was just another unavoidable “time-wasting” period, as unavoidable as sleeping or showering. After all, how could I possibly write while operating a vehicle?

But I was wrong.

Enter Dragon Software, a popular voice-to-speech converter. After a quick installation, I began using Dragon during my commutes. It’s as easy as saying the words aloud and vocalizing the punctuation (literally saying things like “period” and “exclamation point”). It’s entirely hands free, which me this software enables me to write as I drive.

Since late October, I’ve begun using this software for yet another new project, something I’m tentatively calling Prescott. Like Cassidy, I plan to write 100% of this book while commuting to and from work. In the time since I’ve started, I’ve noticed a few interesting things in my writing as a result of using speech-to-text software.

First: The structure and pacing of your writing will change

When writing on a laptop, it is easy to go back and change a line or re-order your paragraphs on a whim. Sometimes coming up with sentences takes time. Phrasing can be complicated or uniquely structured. But when speaking, it’s a whole different ballgame. When speaking, everything becomes much simpler. Complex sentences like “He gazed at the vista above his head, enamored by its pristine color, decorated by puffs of white like cotton candy” become “He looked at the sky. It was blue. He saw a few clouds here and there.” The flow also becomes much faster. Events that would take pages to get through suddenly pass by in paragraphs, making for a quick read, but a significantly less fleshed-out world.

Two: Grammar and spelling will never be right

Speech-to-text software like Dragon is pretty impressive, but it’s not perfect. No matter how well you enunciate, there will always be screw-ups. In fact, there will be lots of them.

I can’t tell you how many times “sighed” has been written as “side”, “nodded” has been written as “knotted” and “win” has been written as “when”. But as long as you’re aware that these issues are taking place, you can catch a majority of them with a quick skim of the document. At this point, I’ve become so accustomed to these common errors, that I can spot them almost instantly. It’s something that comes with time and practice.

So sure, there is still a component of writing that involves sitting behind a computer screen and typing, though what would have once been hours of typing is now reduced to a few minutes of quick editing. In the grand scheme of things, you’re still saving a tremendous amount of time.

Prescott is currently 15,544 words long and around 50% finished. As my first attempt writing a story using this software, by no means am I expecting to produce a full-length novel. My ultimate plan for this story is to include it in a short-story collection, perhaps an omnibus of stories set in the world of The Color of Water and Sky series. But whatever I choose to do, I can say this experiment has definitely been worthwhile.

I encourage any writer who feels like there is not enough time in the day to try speech-to-text software. Give it a shot. You may like it. You may not. And if you find that writing this way is not for you, you can always use it to jot down quick spontaneous notes on the go. There’s certainly benefit to that.

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