Silver Clipboard

Instant, Ubiquitous Capture

A notepad in your back pocket will change your life.

If you get an idea, write it down now. Not five minutes from now, but right now. This is called ubiquitous capture: having some device on you at all times, to record your thoughts.

Many people who are creative depend on ubiquitous capture for a living. For example, the writer of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David, uses this method to gather ideas for his show from moments in his life. He keeps a notepad in his pocket for writing down funny ideas that occur to him or situations that happen to him. Jonathan Coulton, the king of geeky music, uses the voice record function of his mobile phone to instantly capture song ideas

Instant is the key word because you cannot trust yourself for a moment to keep that idea in your head. If you think ‘I’ll just finish what I’m doing then I’ll write that thought down’ it will be gone in twenty seconds.

Once you get in the habit of having the notebook on yourself all the time, you’ll develop lots of uses for it and wonder how you ever got by before. One of my favorite uses of ubiquitous capture is for book recommendations. Often people mention in conversation some good book they’ve recently read, but when I get to the library, it’s nearly impossible to remember what the book is when looking for something new to read. But not with ubiquitous capture. Now I jot the title down in my notebook and later transfer it to my books-to-read list.

As a side effect of using ubiquitous capture, others assume you are a more serious person. When people mention something and you immediately write it down, it sends a message that you respect the other person’s opinion or that you can be trusted to get the job done.

Get a notepad and change your life.

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Original header photograph by michale.