diego's blog

Taking notes on the go

Some people have their best ideas while in the shower. Some while going for number two. I get my best ideas when walking outside, but ideas are fidgety, and an incredible idea might be gone after I see a cute dog walking nearby.

How do you capture notes on the go?

For most people, the answer would be their phone: take it out, write a couple of lines, and move on. Yet, I try to leave the house without a phone whenever possible, especially if I'm going on a "thinking walk." Hence, this solution does not work for me.

Alternative number two is to take pen and paper with you. I do this, but I still find that stopping every time I want to record a thought (which is very often) is not fun; it kills the walking mood, and you end up not walking as much or not writing all your thoughts.

The solution was "clear": I needed to use my smartwatch / Bluetooth headphones to get my thoughts into the digital world. When I first started thinking about this, I made a few attempts with the Apple Watch and ran into a few issues:

  1. Recording quality of AirPods Pro while on the move is HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE. It is much better to be without headphones and bring your watch next to your face and talk. At first, I was very frustrated by this as it seems to be a long-standing issue with Apple. With time, I realized that if I'm wearing AirPods, I'm probably listening to something and not spending as much time thinking. That way, if I want to use a walk for thinking, it will be AirPods free, which makes more sense overall.

  2. I don't have cellular data on my Apple Watch, and dictation offline didn't seem to work without a phone connection. Again, I was super frustrated by this until I realized, playing a little bit, that with the watch, as long as your dictation is in English (US), it works offline without a phone. There is a lack of support for other languages, but I'm fine talking to my Apple Watch in English, even if it means I will get a few weird looks in the streets of non-English-speaking countries.

  3. Dictation is not superb for long audios. There was a time when I wanted to use the setup to record long thoughts, like this post, and then automatically have it translated for me. That didn't work as expected either, and I haven't found a good way to solve this problem yet.

The solution that works:

I created a simple shortcut I have as a complication on my watch. It involves two steps:

  1. Dictate audio (force it to be English US)

  2. Create a new Reminder in the Inbox List with the content.

That's it. On my weekly reviews, I go over my inbox and capture anything I recorded on the go.

This is particularly helpful and has been working great. My only caveat is that the Speech to Text algorithm sometimes fails miserably, and the transcription is VERY BAD. It has happened to me probably 2 or 3 times out of 100 that I could not understand my idea. Most of the time, it isn't good, but I can infer what I wanted to remember, which was the goal, not perfection, just remembering.