The blank box is expensive.
A text field accepts anything, which sounds like power and lands as work. The user has to decide what the system can do, phrase it, and then find out whether the phrasing was right. Compare that to picking a date, ticking a box, or clicking the thing you meant. The typing is not the slow part - the composing is, and every prompt charges it again.
It costs even when you know what you want.
Note 03 covers the user who doesn't know what to ask. This is the other half: the user who knows exactly what they want and still has to type it. We watched this with the Answer Wizard - given an open field, people typed two or three words, far fewer than they would have said out loud to a colleague, because composing for a machine is work and they were rationing it. The interface asked for a sentence and offered nothing in return for writing a good one.
Pick the narrowest control that fits.
A date is a picker, not a phrase. A choice among known things is a list. A range is a selection you drag. A repeated action is a saved thing with a button on it. Direct manipulation beats description whenever the set of options is small enough to show, because pointing at what you mean cannot be misread. Excel has a formula bar, but it also has autosum, and nobody types the range they can select.
What to build.
Reserve words for what only words can express: intent, nuance, the thing you did not anticipate. Everywhere else, give the gesture. When you must show a field, never show it empty - seed it with the most likely request, offer a few real examples drawn from the user's own data, and let the field be edited rather than composed. And once a sentence has been written, keep it: turn it into something with a name and a button, so it is typed once and run forever.