There's a story in Plato's Phaedrus about the invention of writing. The god Theuth offers it to the king of Egypt as a recipe for memory and wisdom. The king isn't convinced:
this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves... they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Strangely, two and a half thousand years later, I've found the exact opposite. Flicking through my Apple Notes (2,096 of them since 2012) I've found a series of fleeting thoughts, old shopping lists and cryptic instructions. Nearly half of them, 43%, are under eight words. The median note is eleven words long. Less body of knowledge, more confetti:
Police tell you to go to pub: Find frequency. Ghost gives you task.
NNN: Secrets of the Digital World. Dance of the snowflakes.
Choice: Choice. Values. Curiosity and follow things making things.
Each was clearly urgent enough to write down, and are now almost impossible to decode. Was "Choice" a decision I had to make, or a value I wanted to keep? Is Dance of the snowflakes the key to the secrets of the digital world? I still have no idea.
As I read, though, I noticed something. The same preoccupations resurfaced year after year. Half-formed ideas were articulations of one bigger idea. Fragments that, lined up, told a surprisingly coherent story of what I'd been thinking about for a decade. The notes weren't the problem. The mess was.
Now I've watched enough "second brain" videos to know that tagging and structuring these notes is key. The trouble is that catching and sorting want to happen in the same instant, and they can't. The moment I stop to decide where a thought belongs, the thought is gone.
Each mode of thinking has always come with a trade-off:
| Mode | Why it's good | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Fleeting & verbatim | Catches the thought the instant it arrives; no friction; honest and raw | Disconnected, unfindable, piles up into nonsense |
| Structured & filed | Findable, connected, compounds over time | Friction at the worst moment; deciding where it belongs kills the thought |
For most of my life you had to pick one, and accept the trade-offs. I wanted to see whether new technology could finally give me both at once: keep the capture exactly as it is, fast and messy and verbatim and free of any filing, and let something else take care of the sorting afterwards, on my behalf. With LLMs, for the first time, that looked possible.
Everything goes into one place: my daily note in Obsidian. I record a lot of it verbatim, often just talking and writing straight onto the page as the thought arrives. A to-do, a quote, a stray idea, something I noticed about a project, a line from the book I'm reading. It all lands in the same file, in whatever order it turns up, with no decision about where it should live. The daily note is the single point of entry, and capture stays as thoughtless as it always was.
The sorting happens later, and I don't do it. Each morning a scheduled Claude task reads yesterday's note and sends each piece to where it belongs. Tasks land on the right Kanban board. A quote joins the commonplace book. A book thought attaches itself to that book's notes. A work observation slots into the right project. Ideas are the part I like best: instead of piling up in a list, each idea is its own living page, and a new thought doesn't start a fresh note, it gets appended to the idea it already belongs to. The idea grows.
Two things make this trustworthy rather than terrifying. First, Claude never rewrites the original note. It only moves it, filed by date, exactly as I left it. Second, anything it can't confidently place goes into a pile called Unfiled. That pile is the honest bit. Not everything has a home yet, and when Unfiled starts filling up it is telling me the system needs a new shelf.
The reflective stuff (what went well, what I want more of, what drained me) stays in the daily note. Once a week Claude reads it back and writes it up into a short review. I then discuss this with a real life human. Capture, sort, grow, review, repeat.
Writing never gave me the false confidence of knowing everything. It gave me thousands of true, tiny, scattered fragments and no way to see them together. The fix isn't to write less, or to trust my memory more. It is to keep writing badly, in eight-word bursts, and let the machine do the part I never could: read it all back and put it where it belongs.
The notes still won't make me omniscient. But for the first time, they might add up to something.
I'll keep you posted.