I usually take the minutes of the German Pirate Party assemblies. It is non-trivial to transcribe two days of speach alone (and I don’t know steno). A better solution is a collaborative editor and multiple people typing while listening to the audio with increasing delay, i.e. one person gets life audio, the next one 20 seconds delay, etc… There is EtherPad, but the web client cannot really handle the 250kB files a full day transcript needs, also two of the persons interested in taking minutes (me included) strongly prefer VIm over a glorified textfield.
Hence: On the 23rd of June I downloaded the VIm source and started implementing collaborative editing. On the 28th and 29th three people used it for hours without major problems (except I initially started the server in a gdb to get a backtrace in case of a crash and the gdb unhelpfully stopped it on the first SIGPIPE—but that was not the fault of my software).
To give you an idea of the complexity of collaborative editing, let me quote Joseph Gentle from http://sharejs.org: “I am an ex Google Wave engineer. Wave took 2 years to write and if we rewrote it today, it would take almost as long to write a second time.” It took me 5 days (and I had a full-day meeting on one of them) to deliver >80% of the goodness. Alone.
You are not living as much on the edge as you should optimally.
I estimate that most LW Readers are relatively young (i.e. < 40y old). The repair mechanism of your bodies can deal with a lot more than they currently have to handle. To increase your effectiveness multiple routes exist:
move faster, run instead of walk
employ polyphasic sleep
take more stimulants