17.09.2026
Capturing your tasks
In April 2011 I wrote that I’d bought myself a voice recorder. I’d been through the iPod, the notepad and the pencil, and none of them worked for me. With the recorder every note became a spoken note, and at night they went into the computer.
Fifteen years on I’m still doing the same. The devices changed and nothing else did.
In fact this that you’re reading is made that way. The cards where I tell you something I lived through aren’t written from memory in front of a screen: I tell them out loud for half an hour and then they get written up. They come out better, because telling and drafting aren’t the same operation, and doing both at once ruins them both.
The idea isn’t mine and isn’t new. The scientist gets his formula in the shower and the apple falls on Newton. What I can say is that I’ve spent fifteen years confirming that the hard part isn’t having the idea. It’s that the idea doesn’t get lost between the moment you have it and the moment you reach somewhere you can do something about it.
Because the head is a terrible place to store things. It’s superb at having them and hopeless at keeping them, and on top of that it hands them back at the wrong moment: at three in the morning, or halfway through a conversation where you can’t act on it.
The text isn’t talking about productivity. It’s talking about the mind, and it says this:
For him who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his very mind will be the greatest enemy.
Bhagavad-gītā 6.6. 1972 edition.
Friend or enemy. It offers no third state, and that’s where this stops being an office matter. A head carrying twenty unresolved things is not on your side: it will bring them back one at a time, at the worst moment, just to remind you they’re still there.
Getting them out and putting them somewhere fixed isn’t an organising trick. It’s stopping the fight.
Anything will do, on two conditions: that there is only one of it and that it’s always within reach. A notebook, a recorder, the phone. Which one doesn’t matter. That there aren’t two does, because the moment there are two you trust neither, and you go back to keeping everything in your head, which is where we were trying to get it out of.
There’s a whole book of mine about this, Productivity for Lazies: twelve points, read in an afternoon. But the first one is this one, and doing only this one already shows.