Small Fleeting Ideas: capture quickly.
If you don't quickly capture an idea, it will vanish. The best idea you've had in a week could be gone in a second. I know, it tends to be somewhere between the car and the front door that I tell myself, "I'll remember this." Famous last words.
The gap
There is a gap between the moment you have a thought and the moment that thought exists somewhere outside your head.
Mine used to run about ninety seconds. Unlock the phone. Find the app. Wait for the list to load. Tap the button for a new note. Wait for the cursor. Start typing, by which point the sentence I wanted has been quietly replaced by a worse one that I will not notice is worse until tomorrow.
Ninety seconds does not sound like much.
It is plenty.
Small and fragile
Jonathan Ive once said that "ideas are so fragile." I have been quoting that line for over a decade and I keep coming back to it, because the fragility is not a metaphor.
An idea you just had is a pattern nothing has reinforced yet. Anything knocks it out. A text message. A door. Someone asking what you want for dinner.
We treat forgetting as a memory problem. Most of the time it is a capture problem, and those have very different fixes. You cannot practice your way into a better memory this afternoon. You can absolutely shorten a gap this afternoon.
Where mine went
For years I kept three notebooks. One for the day job, full of quick notes and sketched wireframes. One formal personal journal, where scraps got turned into something that made sense. And one small red notebook that was pure scratch pad.
The red one did the most work by a wide margin. I know exactly why.
It never asked me a question. I did not have to name the thing, file it, or decide what it was about before it would accept a sentence. I opened it and wrote.
The phone should have replaced that notebook years before it did. Not because a phone is worse at holding words, but because every app I tried wanted a decision from me first. Which notebook? Which folder? What is the title? By the time I had answered, the thought had moved on without me.
A scratch pad does not interview you.
This is the whole reason Smolpad lives in the menu bar. Record a global shortcut in Settings and the panel opens over whatever you were doing, from any app, without finding a window first. ⌘N starts a new note. There is a "New note on open" setting for when you would rather the shortcut land you on a blank page every time.
Count the taps
Try this with whatever you use now. Count the steps between "I have a thought" and "the thought is recorded."
Count taps and keystrokes, not seconds. Seconds are a feeling and you will be generous with yourself. Taps are a number.
If it comes to more than three, you are losing ideas right now. You will not notice you are losing them, because the ones that get away leave nothing behind to count. That is the part that makes this hard to take seriously until you fix it.
Capture is not curation
The other thing that quietly kills a capture habit is editing while you catch.
You have the thought, you reach for the notebook, and somewhere in between you start deciding whether the thought is any good. Is this worth writing down? Where would it even go? Is it a project or just a mood?
Stop. Write it badly.
A note that says "something about the onboarding being backwards" is worth more than the careful paragraph you never wrote. You are not producing anything at capture time. You are leaving a note for the version of you who has half an hour and a coffee.
A note's first line becomes its title and its filename, so the file names itself out of whatever you typed first. No title field, no prompt, nothing to answer before you can write. Rename that first line later and the file on disk follows along.
The part nobody does
Capture without review is a more elaborate way of forgetting.
I have been guilty of this for entire years. Notes go in, nothing comes out, and the pile becomes its own small source of guilt until I stop opening it at all.
So: once a week, read what you caught.
Most of it will be junk. That is not a sign the practice is failing, it is the price of the practice working. You wrote things down without judging them, which was the point, and the judging happens now instead. Two good ideas out of thirty is a good week.
Type #ideas anywhere in a note and it becomes a tag you can tap to filter the list down. ⌘K goes to search. Both are just text in your files, so the weekly read-through works the same in any editor, on any device, years from now.
Start with one
You do not need a system. Systems designed before there are any notes in them tend to describe an imaginary person's week.
Pick the one place your thoughts go. Make getting to it cost fewer than three taps. Write things down badly, on purpose. Read them back on Sunday.
Shorten the gap. That is the whole practice.
Smolpad is a tiny Markdown editor for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It lives in your Mac's menu bar, opens on a keystroke, and keeps every note as a plain .md file in your own iCloud or Dropbox. Free for your first ten notes, with every editing feature included.