Is working from home a constant reminder that you do not type as fast as your legal assistant?

Since you already bought that new headset for all of the videoconference meetings, you should look at speech recognition tools to really boost your productivity.

For years, I have used Nuance Dragon Professional Individual for speech recognition. You can download it now at the Nuance website for $300.00. Unless you are going to be dictating many legal citations each day, I don’t suggest the more expensive Lega Edition. Training of the software only takes a short time.

The speech recognition gets better the more you use it, if you make good use of User Profiles since the acoustics of different rooms vary. Set a different profile for each location where you will be working. I have three profiles: Work, Home and On the Road. The latter was set up so that using it in various hotel rooms didn’t retrain the other two software profiles.

Office 365 subscribers have noticed a Dictate button has appeared in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. This feature works quite well, although at this point it is only text-to-speech and doesn’t have the advanced features of Dragon Professional. But it doesn’t require training and you have it available right now.

Alternating dictation with keyboarding will likely mean you are less tired at the end of the day as well.