Turn off your inner editor

I want to understand why dictating text works not only as a speed boost, but as a different mode of thinking.

I used to talk about fast capture, but it’s not just about speed. In an interview, Andy Matuschak mentioned that he walks around the room and dictates text instead of typing. What caught my attention wasn’t that it’s faster, but that speaking seems to switch off the inner editor. When you type, you’re constantly tweaking, deleting, rewriting, and that can look like thinking. But sometimes it’s more like a brake.

I started looking at this through the metaphor of modern file systems. Many of them are designed for flash storage and work in a way where changes aren’t made “in place”, but layered on top: updates are often written as new fragments, while the old gets replaced at the structural level. So fragmentation becomes a normal state, not a failure that must be “fixed” with regular defragmentation. Order and clarity don’t appear at the moment of writing, but on later passes. I think it’s similar with thoughts. They don’t have to be perfectly clean right away. You can capture first, and leave understanding and editing for the next iterations.^{1 2 3}

And there’s one more important thing: a thought can be not only edited, but continued. Like in Luhmann’s card system, where a line of reasoning develops through follow-up cards^{4 5}, rather than by endlessly rewriting the previous one. A kind of serial thinking.

So the idea of this note is simple: when you capture a thought, you don’t have to edit it immediately. Fast capture is sometimes more valuable than the perfect phrasing. Editing can happen later, either by you, or already at the level of how the text is consumed.

Right now I’m recording this by voice. The thought is flowing. I can unpack it later, compress it, or leave it as is. But the main thing is that it’s captured here and now. For me, a voice note is increasingly becoming exactly this method: capturing the movement of a thought without getting in its way with unnecessary control.