There's one habit I want to share with anyone trying to adopt a new one: catch your ideas. We talk about business ideas, freelance gigs, and side bets at every hangout, and the moment the conversation ends, the idea is gone — never executed, never revisited. Brain Dump is the app I built to stop that from happening to me.
The habit, then the tool
I made it a rule to capture every idea that surfaces, whether or not I'll ever act on it. I know I'll forget what I talked about today, so writing it down isn't optional — it's the whole point. Most ideas won't go anywhere. A few will. The ones that do are usually the ones I almost forgot.
Brain Dump is a web app dedicated to that habit. No projects, no tags to maintain, no folders. The friction is the enemy; it just needs to catch the thought.
Dictation as the entry point
Brain Dump is wired to VoiceInk, a dictation app I forked to integrate the flow. The hotkey is Right Option — press it, and a new idea is created in Brain Dump automatically. I talk through the thought, release, and the transcript flows in.
Three buckets, one capture
Once dictation finishes, the entry is split into three sections by an LLM pass:
- Idea — a clean summary of what I just dumped.
- Action items — concrete next steps if any are implied.
- Key points — the quotable, manifesto-shaped fragments worth keeping.
The third bucket is the one I care about most. Today it looks like a small pile of notes. After five years of doing this, I expect it to be enough material for a book — or a talk, or whatever else compounds out of consistently catching what would otherwise be lost.
Why a separate app
I have notes apps. The reason this lives on its own is that idea capture has a different shape than note-taking. It needs to be one gesture, no decisions, and the transcript needs to land already organized so I'll actually come back to it.
That's the whole pitch — catch your ideas before they slip. The remembering part is what the tool is for.