Holding your thoughts

I've long struggled to keep ideas floating in my head without interruption. I'll be thinking through a concept, trying to figure it out, then something floats in. It might be an outside force, someone needing to talk to me, a Slack message, an email, a fly buzzing past me, a branch blowing against my window, the air current shifting, my finger twitching. You get the idea. Things external or internal fighting against my mind's ability to remember.

Now, this is different than focusing on a concept, which is a whole field of work I've been wrestling through for years—and something which Cal Newport has written about at length in books like Deep Work. What I'm talking about is something more annoying. Where I'm thinking about something one moment and the next it's gone. Vanished into the ether. Completely thrown to the gulf of oblivion, and the chance of it coming back is the roll of a die.

As a kid this was incredibly frustrating. I'd be pondering an idea, walk through a room, and instantly forget it on the other side. I tried many techniques to help assuage this constant disruption of my brain, to varying success.

That was part of my journey of trying to own little capture devices through the years: a Palm Pilot, my watch, writing things down, whatever I could do to create a backup of my mind.

Then the iPhone came along, and with it a perfect tool for saving things on the go. Of course it's a two-edged device, where much distraction itself comes from the glowing rectangle.

But the formula has been there for me to remember, a thing that I drastically desire.

I'm not talking about long-term storage, saving deep concepts or things I've wrestled through. That's all fine and good, and I've found many ways to capture that.

What I'm talking about are the quick-capture ideas I have, the notes I want to save, the good ideas (that probably aren't really that good, but in the moment you never know) that I just want to store temporarily outside of my mental RAM.

That's where technology is so amazing. Between my iPhone, Apple Watch, and now the Pebble Index, I have the theoretical ability to use my voice or type a few keys to save and store ideas.

Sometimes the best ideas come when I'm out on a run. I've had some 5K jaunts that ended with a dozen written-down notes, captured via voice memos or Siri messages. Now, I can just use my Index to save those notes for later.

What a time to be alive. For brains like mine, it's a gift of tools helping to fix a limitation I've long struggled to overcome.

Now, the funny thing happens after capturing all that. The twelve perfect ideas I captured on that trail run turned out to not be so great in the light of a new day, so maybe it's not as valuable as I thought. But I chose to then discard them, instead of losing them to the unexpected whim of something so mundane as an air conditioner shifting on and distracting me.

With it comes a calmness, a knowing that fun thoughts are saveable, and beyond that the practical reality of being able to quickly save to-dos that come to mind, move them to my task manager, and offload them from my brain's running processes.

Recently, at a doctor's office appointment, something came up where I'd need to write down a reminder related to another appointment. In the middle of our conversation I paused, spoke for three seconds to my ring, and captured the reminder for later. It was a quick interruption, but I didn't have to pull out my phone. I just threw in a natural pause in the conversation. My doctor stared down at the ring, realized its benefit immediately, and took down a note of her own to purchase one.

The tools are going to be different for everyone. I own a score of Field Notes for the exact same purpose. I like saving tasks on my Mac while working, or pulling up my iPhone and literally opening my task manager to type out the task. But having quicker ways, through voice methods that actually work—it's amazing. What a dream to know that fleeting reminders or thoughts can at least be saved to then be dealt with later. If I'm in the middle of one task and have a thought for another, I can offload it and return back to the task I wanted to focus on in the first place.

Now, if only Siri could get good enough. Here's to hoping.