I started typing insights when I became a parent - as a “What should they know one day” kinda tool. Then I became obsessive about collecting resources and insights I get when reading or talking to people. Your writing and insights is the only thing that’s left of your brain after you pass (even if that happens 50 years from now).
Some people do daily journaling - not me, but possibly many here. Some see it as therapy - laying out what bothers you, or what you’re grateful for, to share with someone or put it away. Some use it as a way to get anxiety and stress out of your head by extracting down what needs done where and taking it out of your active memory. The Getting Things Done method.
A lot of people have writing as a way of relieving FOMO if your mind is much faster than your ability to articulate all of your thoughts. Call it ADHD, or a way to brainstorm with yourself - you surface your thoughts in front of you and can then edit and manipulate them - see if and what parts make sense, or if it’s just a nebulous cloud of general ideas that melts down when you read it as if it’s told to you by someone else. For that you need a really fast, possibly visual tool like Figma or Remarkable (I find figma easier to re-organize) or Visio (expensive) or a white board.
So the use cases are very wide range and no single tool yet can cover them - mostly because you need either low latency, or high ability to organize, or ways of manipulating data visually, or search, or ability to ensure your external brain software will be alive in 2 years (aka open source), or available on all of your devices to capture anywhere anytime. One requirement steps on the others usually.
Some people do daily journaling - not me, but possibly many here. Some see it as therapy - laying out what bothers you, or what you’re grateful for, to share with someone or put it away. Some use it as a way to get anxiety and stress out of your head by extracting down what needs done where and taking it out of your active memory. The Getting Things Done method.
A lot of people have writing as a way of relieving FOMO if your mind is much faster than your ability to articulate all of your thoughts. Call it ADHD, or a way to brainstorm with yourself - you surface your thoughts in front of you and can then edit and manipulate them - see if and what parts make sense, or if it’s just a nebulous cloud of general ideas that melts down when you read it as if it’s told to you by someone else. For that you need a really fast, possibly visual tool like Figma or Remarkable (I find figma easier to re-organize) or Visio (expensive) or a white board.
So the use cases are very wide range and no single tool yet can cover them - mostly because you need either low latency, or high ability to organize, or ways of manipulating data visually, or search, or ability to ensure your external brain software will be alive in 2 years (aka open source), or available on all of your devices to capture anywhere anytime. One requirement steps on the others usually.