How Steven Bartlett Got 90% Faster Across Every App

Steven Bartlett - - host of The Diary of a CEO and founder of a $425M creator holding company - - says he made one switch that made him roughly 90% faster across every app he uses. He stopped typing and started speaking, using a voice dictation tool called Wispr Flow.

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Voice dictation isn't new. The reason most people abandon it is accuracy: even at a 10% error rate, older tools meant re-editing every single message - - which kills the whole point.

So like most people, Bartlett kept typing, and stayed slow. The tool was supposed to save time but cost it back in corrections.

The bottleneck wasn't just speed. In his own words: "I become a bottleneck in my own company."

Work that needed him didn't move until he sat down at a keyboard. For someone running a business the size of his, the cost of that lag compounds fast - - every reply, approval, and brief waiting on his hands.

Here's the part most productivity advice misses. Bartlett estimates his best thinking happened on the move - - walking, exercising, in transit - - with no practical way to capture it.

By his estimate he lost 70-80% of his best ideas simply because they arrived when a keyboard wasn't in front of him. The thinking was never the constraint. Capture was.

The fix was to make voice his primary input, not a backup. Bartlett deployed Wispr Flow across every device and communication channel he uses.

That means the same voice-to-text layer everywhere - - Slack, iMessage, email, notes - - so the tool disappears and the speaking is all that's left. One input method, every app.

The headline number: message time dropped from about 30 seconds to 5. In his words, "the gap between my thought and my delivery collapses."

By his account, around 90% of what he dictates now requires zero edits - - the accuracy problem that sinks most dictation tools is the exact thing that makes this one stick.

Speed at the top only matters if it spreads. After seeing the difference, Bartlett says his wider team adopted Wispr Flow across the organization - - reportedly 89% of them.

The impact: one person's speed became the team's operating standard. Less typing, more shipping, across the whole company.

Strip away the celebrity and the logic is simple. You type at roughly 60 words per minute. You can speak at around 220. The ceiling on your output isn't your thinking - - it's your hands.

Voice-first work removes that ceiling, which is why it's showing up in more and more senior operators' stacks. If you're assembling yours, our guide on how to set up ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot covers the foundations.

You've got the process - - now put it to work. Get the same edge: start flowing, and write faster across all your apps.

Don't type, just speak. Try Wispr Flow free.

Steven Bartlett uses Wispr Flow, a voice-to-text tool he has deployed across every device and communication channel, citing roughly 90% time savings on messaging and an estimated 89% of his team adopting it after him.

Most people type at around 60 words per minute but can speak at roughly 220 words per minute. That gap is why voice-first input can dramatically increase output speed for writing-heavy work.

Accuracy. Even a 10% error rate means editing every message, which cancels out the time saved. Tools that reach very high accuracy, so most dictation needs no edits, are the ones people actually keep using.