I've been interested recently in ways in which we interact with the tools around us. In most of my life, this boils down to communicating ideas that are inside my brain (in the form of words) to others. In order to communicate these ideas – there are three methods that I can currently call on:

  1. spoken word
  2. written word
  3. written pictures

By far, the method that takes up the largest amount of my time and effort is method one. Because of this, I've been interested in ways that I might improve the brain-to-word throughput that I have. This investment should, hopefully, pay dividends later in life. As is with most tools, the easier and faster that you can get ideas out of your head and into the real world, the more options you have to try out ideas with minimum barrier to entry, iterate and improve.

This brought my search to methods of typing. There are LOADS of keyboard loyouts, all professing to be faster than each other or more efficient. For all of these methods, however, there is a fundamental limitation: they accept that we must type one letter at a time.

I explored a number of new types of keyboard that offer more flexibility, but none of them could overcome the one-letter limitation. However, this morning I read The Art of Chording. It really rang home with my search for a better way and seems like an excellent path forwards.

Stenography, rather than use letters as the building blocks for words, uses sounds. On top of this, we can construct sounds as chords of key presses. What a fantastic system: multiple letters typed from multiple keys at once.

Since Stenography has been around for about 200 years now and is a standard in transcription services, this also offers some confidence that it's working pretty well for real-time conversion of ideas to words.

I plan to practice this daily for the next few months and see how my skills progress/if it actually helps me. To do this, there are a few tools that I'm going to use: