First of all, sorry to hear that you've lost your ability to type for a few months. That must be frustrating, and I hope you recover quickly. Something similar to me happened during my PhD and I couldn't type for about 3 months. Here are the tasks that I usually find myself needing to type.
- Emails
- Material for my teaching, like lecture notes, worksheets for students, HW, etc.
- Research papers
- Answers on math overflow
What are some solutions for not being able to type?
- Speech to text programs are very good nowadays. A colleague of mine always dictates his emails, due to carpal tunnel. Here are instructions for gmail and here for outlook.
- This one is tricky. If you have trouble writing on the blackboard, then consider recording a lecture where you talk through the important points in whatever book you're teaching from. Loom is a great free resource for this. It records your screen and your face (if you want) and you can scroll through the reading and talk through the important bits. If I couldn't type, I'd assign problems from the book instead of writing my own, and I'd devote class time to having students work in small groups instead of me writing on the board.
- Certainly you can dictate paragraphs of text (e.g., for the introduction) as in (1). But, references are hard and latex is hard. Thomas Kojar has suggested a resource for speech to latex. Another alternative would be to have zoom meetings with co-authors to explain things and let them bear the brunt of the typing. If you can write by hand and not type (e.g., if a concussion is preventing you from looking at screens) then one option is so write things by hand and send pictures to your co-authors. If you don't have coauthors, this tool that can convert a photo of math into latex. Specifically, it links to mathpix.
- I would just drop non-esssential activities like this.
General advice: Save your energy for the things that really matter. Consider leaning on a friend who can help during this time, and you can kinda owe them one when you're better. I couldn't wash dishes for 3 months, so my roommate did, and then I was able to repay the favor by doing more cleaning when I was back to normal.
Even more general advice: it might be helpful to remember that bad things happen to people every day, and more often than not, people have the capability to bounce back. I've seen colleagues dealing with the death of a parent or spouse. I'm pretty sure they were not writing mathematics for several months, and that's totally fine. Your humanity comes first. The system is set up so that you can achieve success even if you're not at your best 100% of the time. When I was unable to type, I was also taking strong painkillers, and I'm pretty sure anything I said was nonsense. So I may as well have just focused on healing and not tried to stay active mathematically. When bad things happen to my students, I encourage them to think about expected value. If there's a probability of 1% every day of an accident happening, then you'd expect an accident about once every 100 days. It's helpful to think of all the other days that nothing bad happened, and realize this kind of thing is to be expected. Again, you can certainly bounce back. Get well soon!