Three years ago, my coworker went on vacation for about 3 weeks.

Since I work in IT, that meant I had a shit ton of tickets to deal with.

Not only did I have to take on her load, but there just happened to be a bunch of shit going on, so my fingers were stressed to the bone with typing and clicking and all that.

At the end of one of those days, my tendons were so stiff that I felt like Wolverine.

After that, I had to go to physical therapy and occupational therapy.

Occupational therapy is the one you go to for hands.

Now, I’m pretty much better.

But what I learned from that experience is that (and this should’ve been obvious) when you do something repetitive each and every day, if you’re not doing anything to counteract that repetition, bad things are going to happen.

So if you type and click and blah, blah, blah all day, you have 2 options.

1. Counteract those exact movements with specific exercises.
2. Do less of that repetitive shit.

Ideally, you do both, but for me, what has reduced a lot of the repetition is Letterly.

Now, this is not an ad despite how glowing I’m going to sound about this, but this is a transcription software.

Yeah, I know.

With the advent of AI, everything has the feature of, “Oh, let’s capture your voice, and you can make 15 newsletters, 38 social media posts, and 10 blogs.”

No, this ain’t that kind of shit.

Although you can set up custom things to rewrite things in the way you want.

What I use this for is to say what I want to say, and then Letterly will capture it more accurately than any other transcription service by far.

I’m talking fictional character names, niche softwares, anything you can think of... it will, with a high degree of certainty, get it correct.

And that’s also on top of the relatively perfect grammar and punctuation it applies by default.

If you stutter or correct yourself when you talk, it will usually just have the best take, so to speak.

Now, that by itself is badass, right?

But the main thing that made me write this today is the recent dictation feature.

Now, you can download Letterly to your computer, hit a key combination, say whatever the hell you want, let go of the key combination, and it will paste wherever you are.

It’ll paste whatever you said exactly where the text field is.

So if you open an email, press the hotkeys, dictate the entire email, let go of the hotkeys, your email will be written.

Anything more than one sentence, and I'm just dictating it to Letterly.

And the awesome part is, it also works on your phone.

So if you have Android or iOS, it doesn’t matter.

The same thing applies.

You can set it up so that whenever you enter a text field, a little pop-up will show, and if you click it, it’s the same deal.

Say what you want, click the stop button, and then it will paste anything you said with perfect grammar, punctuation, and most capitalization.

You also have the benefit of putting in your custom words in the dictionary that Letterly has so that it can get things correct even more often.

Now, due to all of this, my typing has plummeted to rare occurrences where I have to actually type URLs or numbers or short text fields.

But anything longer than 5 words, I’m activating Letterly because my right hand can’t take that much typing anymore.

I just can’t.

I’m sure this applies to a lot of you guys as well.

So before you need occupational therapy (or if you're already going through it), add this to your routine.

I do not recommend getting Letterly’s monthly plan.

That’s about $20 per month, which is kind of wild, although it’s still arguably worth it.

I would go to appsumo.com and check out Letterly’s page because there’s almost definitely a lifetime deal active.

Now, the bad thing is that you need a license for each device that you use.

But I got to tell you, all of that is still cheaper than occupational therapy is.

So fucking go for it.

I know this sounds like an ad, but I promise I’m not getting paid (though I wish I were).

I just have found an insane benefit with this given the amount of typing I need to do, and I think you’d benefit as well.

So check that out.

Reply to this email if you’ve used it before or if you’ve found something even better.

By the way, if your troubles with your tech job expand far beyond just the typing aspect, check out the Sane Tech Worker's OS below.

It’s made for those who are awesome at their job but have no idea how to actually log off.

That course has all my systems in it, so check that out, too.

Till next time,

Kevin Tejada