The most fruitful moments for contemplation are often the least conducive to capture. I've been working on reducing friction in capturing thoughts, feelings, and ideas wherever I may be and whatever I may be doing. At the same time, I want to stay in the moment and not get distracted by the act of capturing itself.
In addition, I want to retain control over all of this data. It should be stored in human-friendly plaintext format. It should touch as few servers as possible and come to rest on a surface that I control.
I am excited about all three of the capture methods I'm about to share with you. Three questions to whet your appetite:
- What if you could freewrite with pen on paper and have the salient bits magically show up in my digital note corpus?
- What if you could use your locked smartphone to type a note without ever being distracted by its contents?
- What if you could dictate notes while walking, running, or riding a bike without even requiring a smartphone?
To motivate this, watch this quick summary of the scenarios above, and read on for some tech details for how it all works.