The Office Was Built for Typing

I go to the office twice a week. Tuesdays and Fridays. It's fine — good people, decent coffee. But somewhere in the last year I started noticing I wasn't getting into flow there. Not even close.

TL;DRWispr Flow changed my primary work input from keyboard to voice, and suddenly the open office breaks my flow instead of enabling it — which makes me think remote work deserves a second look, especially now.

How I Used to Work

Not long ago, the formula was simple. Sit down, open a text editor, put on headphones, play music. As a software engineer, that was basically it. Quiet mode. Focused for 6, sometimes 10 hours without stopping.

It worked. The office was perfectly designed for exactly that kind of work. Eyes on screen, fingers on keyboard, brain locked in.

Then Wispr Flow Happened

Today I work completely differently. I use Wispr Flow constantly — during development, for private projects, writing emails, thinking through problems. It's basically how I give input to LLMs and agents now. I just talk.

And when I really catch that flow at home, I go. I dictate and dictate and dictate. It's conversational, wide, detailed. Speaking is orders of magnitude faster than typing, and it doesn't interrupt my thinking the way typing does. I can pause, drop a filler word, let the thought come, and Wispr Flow keeps listening until I tell it to stop. The output is richer and more useful than anything I'd type.

I can't do this at the office.

The Office Doesn't Know It Got Old

The feedback I always get from people is that I solve problems better in person. Sure. But solving problems in person means talking to people, which I can do on a Google Meet just as well. What it doesn't mean is sitting two meters from a colleague while I verbally dictate a 400-word prompt to an AI agent.

Offices were designed for a specific kind of work: individual focused tasks done silently at a desk, with occasional meetings. That model made sense when the main tool was a keyboard. When the best way to focus was to block out sound.

Now my main tool is my voice. Blocking out sound means blocking out my work.

If I ever built a team and had an office, I know what it would look like. A small shared common area — somewhere you grab your laptop when you need to sort something out with someone urgently. And then individual rooms. Really small ones. One person per room, door closed, talk as much as you want. But ten steps from a colleague when you need them.

Some people genuinely can't work from home. They need the structure, the physical separation, the people around them. That's real. But that's about those specific people. You don't design your whole company around people who don't deliver without the office.

The office was built for typing. A lot of us aren't typing anymore.