From Thought to Note

In 1843, Ada Lovelace reads about a clockwork computer and sees more than numbers. In her “Notes,” she writes an algorithm and imagines the Analytical Engine composing music. By writing the Notes, she publishes the first algorithm for a machine and argues it could manipulate symbols like music. That shift seeds the idea of software.

The future changes when a thought survives the moment.

As a product builder, ideas drive everything you ship. If you do not capture them, your product suffers. You juggle unanswered questions, half-baked features, and technical unknowns. Whenever the muse is touching you, you need to be ready to capture your thoughts.

You need to identify the fastest path from thought to note.

Solution: Dictate your thoughts and let AI take care of the rest

1. Open Claude (phone or desktop) and start dictating your thoughts. Start with “Let's create a memo.”
2. Claude uses my custom Claude Skill for creating a memo. This ensures it does not react to whatever you are dictating and simply captures message after message as raw input into a file.
3. Send as many messages as you want. Take as long as you need. Just keep dictating and send message after message.
4. When you're ready, say something like “Let's turn this into a memo,” and Claude will create a structured document from it without leaving out any details, while cleaning up all the noise that is no longer needed. It will also create a new page in my inbox database in Notion, where a well-structured memo will be waiting for me to review.

Configuration

• Download or copy the SKILL.md from my GitHub repository: GitHub - Create Memo.
• Optional: Modify the skill to your needs.
• If you want to use the Notion integration, add the database ID to the SKILL.md. Otherwise remove “Step 3: Save to Notion” from it.
• Upload the skill as a zip file to Claude to use it in Claude for web and app: Settings → Capabilities.

Alternatives

• Tana offers a unique and innovative take on notes. One of the brilliant solutions they created is a dedicated mobile capture app that allows you to capture ideas of any type (for example, text, links, images, photos, or voice messages). Assign a so-called supertag to them (e.g., “#memo”) and it will be added to Tana. The supertag basically assigns an object definition to whatever you just captured, and in the case of Memo, it allows you to automatically transform your voice input into a well-structured document.
• Apple Shortcuts is a brilliant way to easily capture your voice (or anything else) and send it to Notion. You can either do this directly or add a ChatGPT step in between that cleans up whatever you entered and generates a title. Your creativity is the only limitation that applies.
• ChatGPT probably has the most accurate voice input of any of the AI apps out there. Ask it to simply write down whatever you say without processing it, start dictating until you are done, and then have it turn the content into a structured note without losing any details. You can also adapt my Claude Skill as a GPT.

Related Resources

• Input Text 4x Faster Using Your Voice