Artifact
How I Review AI Drafts While Walking Instead of Reading Them at a Desk
A push that sends a draft to a reading app and a pull that folds my highlights and comments back into the same file. On one measured day: 74 comments and more than 16,000 steps.
A thing I built. This page says what it is and what is true about it. Dan Stephens writes about psychology, AI systems and the method behind both at danieltstephens.com.
Drafts come to me as walls of text. I get text wall overwhelm, so a long draft read at a desk is where my attention goes to die, and for a while that was the slowest step in everything I make. Now a draft goes to a reading app on my phone, gets read aloud to me at double speed while I walk, and comes back marked. The marks land back in the original file rather than in a separate pile of notes.
What it is made of
- A push that takes a file, strips the working notes, and sends it to my reading app as a document I can listen to.
- A pull that fetches every highlight, the comment attached to it, and any note left on the document as a whole, and folds them back into the file the draft came from.
- Playback at double speed, paused whenever I stop to type.
Where it stands
In daily use, and it is the only way long drafts get reviewed here. There is no complaint left in it. The one thing I want is more highlight colors, and that is a request to the people who make the app rather than a fault in the loop.
Why I do it this way
Moving while listening is something I learned in order to use my ADHD as a strength rather than to manage it as a deficit. There is no single moment this started. It is the accumulation of several things: the text walls, how much better I take in something read aloud, a neck and a back that do not want another hour at a desk, and a weight goal that non-exercise movement actually serves.
By the numbers
- About 160 of my own documents pushed into the reading app since 2026-06-25
- 76 of them read through to the end: roughly 148,000 words, and about 10 hours of reading
- 137 archived, meaning read and dealt with rather than left open
- Almost none of those ten hours happened at my desk
- On one measured day, 2026-09-12: 74 highlights, 74 comments, 6 documents opened and 5 finished, and more than 16,000 steps, most of them during that review
What this did to the rest of the work, and why approving drafts was the bottleneck in the first place, is in the essay.