Most of us make hundreds of small decisions every day. Some matter. Most don’t. What to eat, which email to answer first, whether to do something now or later. Individually they don’t seem like much, but every decision asks for a little mental energy.
That’s why I’ve started paying more attention to the decisions our tools ask us to make.
You open a notes app because an idea pops into your head. Before you’ve written a single word, you’re already deciding:
- Which notebook?
- Which folder?
- Which tag?
- What should I call it?
- Does this belong somewhere else?
None of those questions are difficult, but none of them are about the idea either.
A paper notebook doesn’t ask where a thought belongs before it lets you write it down.
I think every one of those decisions carries a small mental cost. One decision isn’t a problem. Neither are two or three. But digital tools are full of tiny decisions that slowly pile up until writing something down starts feeling more like filing paperwork than thinking.
I sometimes wonder if we’ve optimized note taking apps for retrieval instead of creation. A note can’t be found if it was never written down.
When an idea first appears, it’s fragile. You don’t know where it’s going yet. You don’t know whether it belongs in Work, Reading, Personal, or somewhere else entirely. You just know that if you don’t get it down soon, there’s a good chance it’ll disappear. I’d rather spend my mental energy developing an idea than deciding where it belongs.
Thinking is already hard enough. It takes attention, patience, and sometimes a bit of uninterrupted time. Organization is different. It’s useful, and sometimes necessary, but it isn’t the same thing as thinking. I think we’ve started mixing the two together.
The more effort it takes to capture a thought, the less likely I am to capture it. If opening a notes app feels like starting a filing job, I’ll naturally put it off. Not because I’m lazy, but because my brain knows there’s friction waiting on the other side.
Our attention is already under pressure. Notifications compete for it. Messages compete for it. News, videos, and endless feeds compete for it. Attention has become one of our most valuable resources, so I don’t want to spend more of it answering organizational questions that could easily wait until later.
Lately I’ve found myself using a much simpler approach. A few broad buckets are usually enough. Work. Reading. Personal. Everything else can just be written down.
I’ve never had a better idea because I put it in the right folder. Capturing the idea is what mattered.
Maybe that’s backwards from how we’ve traditionally designed note taking software. Maybe organization shouldn’t come first. Maybe it shouldn’t come second either. Most of the time, it can wait.
A thought can always be organized later. It can’t be organized if it was never captured.
Maybe less organization leaves a little more room to think.