I often jest about how I enjoy listening to my own voice, or how I might as well get used to hearing me speak since I do it so much. A couple of months back, I was in the car combing through my phone book looking for someone to call and talk to about something I'd thought of. No one really fit the bill, and I didn't want to bother someone who wasn't going to be interested, so I started dictating the ideas to my phone instead of writing them down.

It was interesting because I realised that when I'm in the car making phone calls, I often want to explore an idea, and to do so doesn't require a second person.

Dictation is something I never thought I'd ever do, and although I considered the idea, I dismissed it as being “not for me”, or as being something that people used to do. Really, it's just like writing notes, but requires a vastly different mindset to speak in a way that captures your thoughts while being unable to edit previous sections. A bit like an impromptu presentation.

Coming back to the dictation the following the day, I found that I couldn't reasonably transcribe what I was talking about, but by then I'd spent nearly 45 minutes rambling about it so I'd cleared up most of the ambiguity already.

I learnt a lot about myself in that hour, and one of those things was that I don't necessarily need someone on the other end of the phone when I want to listen to the sound of my own voice.