Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about productivity. Not the usual frameworks or hacks or “10 things to make the most of your time”, but just the basics of why things slip. And after trying basically every tool out there, I’ve realised something pretty obvious in hindsight: almost every system collapses at the same bottleneck: data capture. The moment life gets even slightly messy, I stop capturing. If I’m tired after work, hungover on a Sunday, travelling, or just juggling too many things in my head, I stop capturing. And once capture breaks, everything else breaks with it. The real loss isn’t the task I forgot, it’s the idea that could have changed the universe for me.
The universe inside a thought
When I look back, I can tie some genuinely meaningful parts of my life to stupidly small thoughts. As a kid, I wanted to be a doctor, it just felt like the noblest job out there. Then around thirteen, I had this super casual moment where I wondered if engineering could be just as noble. Doctors rely on engineering, engineering enables medicine, everything is connected. It wasn’t some big epiphany, but it stuck, and over time it quietly merged into my core schema of values. That one thought ended up shaping how I look at work, contribution, standing up for what I believe in, working out, posting on social media, basically anything I consider “worth doing.” One tiny idea that quietly set a tone to how I operate.
You see this pattern everywhere. Zuckerberg built the first version of Facebook because he didn’t ignore a small idea. Whether you like the platform or not doesn’t matter, the reality is that one captured idea triggered an entire ecosystem that didn’t exist before. On a smaller scale, people meet partners, mentors, friends, or cofounders because they follow some random thought: go to this meetup, reply to that text, give someone something you don’t need, comment on someone’s glasses. One tiny action you don’t ignore can change a lot.
Much later in life, I realised there’s actually a name for this, the butterfly effect [0]. Small actions sometimes end up having huge impacts, not because the actions themselves are dramatic, but because they nudge your path just enough. And once you start seeing life through that lens, the consequence becomes painfully clear: when you lose ideas before capturing them, you might be losing a better universe you could have stepped into.
The reality of human attention
Ideas never show up when everything is quiet and you’re sitting with a notebook. They show up when you’re walking to get coffee, mid-workout, half-asleep, deep in a conversation, or juggling a bunch of stuff at work. And they disappear just as fast. Attention, I tell you, is one fragile resource. One bit of friction and the idea is gone.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been generating a lot of ideas, travel, reading, engineering work, random daily stuff, but the number I actually captured is embarrassingly low. Not because I didn’t care, but because in the moment I just didn’t have the bandwidth. And once the moment passed, the idea passed with it. This genuinely bothers me because I’ve seen how often meaningful things start as messy, half-formed thoughts.
The Mundane is often the beginning
One thing I’ve convinced with is: an idea doesn’t need to look important when it appears. A lot of my better ideas, in engineering, writing, or even personal life, started off as something that felt trivial. Then the next week, with some new knowledge or a different mood (or an extra coffee haha), they suddenly clicked and seemed brilliant. The idea didn’t magically improve, it was firstly captured, annd was preserved long enough for me to actually think about it.
This is why I’ve become obsessed with capturing everything now. Not because every idea deserves action, but because you literally can’t know the value of most ideas until you revisit it. If it never gets captured, there’s nothing to come back to.
My new obsession: capture verything
Right now my priority is stupidly simple: reduce the friction of capturing ideas to zero. I don’t want to rely on discipline, rather I want to facilitate discipline. I want capturing to be so effortless that I can do it even when I’m tired, distracted, mid-task, or nowhere close to a clean workflow. The more I pay attention to how ideas actually appear and disappear, the more obvious it becomes that the real problem isn’t organisation, it’s preservation.
I don’t expect most ideas to turn into projects. That’s not the point. The point is to avoid losing the ones that might shift something, direction, clarity, momentum. I’ve been building some tools around this for myself, and early signs look promising. I’ll share more soon. For now, it’s simple: stop losing ideas unnecessarily. I’d rather store a hundred unremarkable thoughts than lose one important one. A lost idea really can be a lost universe, not as poetry, but literally - a path you never got to walk because you didn’t write down the first thought.
References
- [0] - Butterfly Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect