How To Remember Everything
My three-step AI workflow to never lose an idea
We all have somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 thoughts a day. If yours are like mine, most of them aren’t worth keeping.
But just like blind squirrels find nuts, every so often, something good pops out of the pile. Something great, even. A revelation. Two unlinked ideas making a new connection. It’s brilliant. And what happens in that moment? For me, it usually looks like this:
“I need a pen. Where’s my notebook? Oh, there it is. Wait, what? No, I’m not getting you another juice box right now, you’ve already had two. What? Go ahead, ask Mom, but you’re getting the same answer. Ahh, there’s the pen. Can you give me one minute, buddy? I need to write this idea down real quick.”
(Opens notebook)
“…Shit. What the hell was it?”
And like that, it’s gone. Like Verbal Kint at the end of Usual Suspects, it straightened out the limp and walked right out of my mind.
Sound familiar?
It was a problem for me in school when the professor would drop a dense idea and move on too quickly. I’d capture half of it, lose the rest, and forget the whole point she was making. It became a bigger problem once I became a recruiter, juggling a dozen open roles across a dozen hiring managers, a trio of candidates for each. My thinking looked like what you see when you expand Claude’s “thinking”: a nonstop inner monologue that moves faster than any human can type. Tasks slipped through my fingers like grains of sand. So did great ideas.
And we all know what happens when you have kids. Sleep deprivation brings on short-term memory loss. If you have ideas, they come while you’re changing a diaper or right before the baby starts crying. Good luck capturing them.
Becoming a solopreneur, the problem went from “annoying inconvenience” to “matter of survival.” In this game, the idea engine is the business engine. Losing good ideas is like leaving your laptop behind. Same panic when you can’t find it. Little you can do once it’s gone.
This last year, I finally built a system to capture my ideas. What started as a desperate Amazon purchase has evolved into a repeatable framework. It takes 10 minutes to set up, 5 minutes to run, and ensures I don’t miss anything.
BUILT FOR REAL LIFE
Let’s be honest: for as much time as we spend sitting at desks, ideas never come when we’re sitting there. Not the good ones, anyway. They show up while we’re doing one of the thousand other things our lives consist of. Walking the dog. Cooking dinner. Driving the kids to t-ball, jiu jitsu, or cheer practice. Standing in the checkout line. In the middle of a workout.
There’s a scientific reason for this. When we’re focused on goal-oriented, cognitively demanding tasks, our brains are in Task-Positive Network mode. The flip side is the Default Mode Network: the brain’s autopilot, driving self-reflection, daydreaming, memory recall, and time-travel into the past or future.
Short answer: it wanders.
That’s why your best ideas come in the shower, doing the dishes, or taking a walk without headphones (yes, we’re still allowed to do that).
So how do you capture them?
If you’re anything like me, you have half a dozen “active” notebooks floating around the house and car. In an ideal world, when the idea strikes, you have the right notebook, a pen, and time to sit down and...
“What? The dog chewed up King Kong? Well, did you leave it on the floor? Yeah, dude, he’s a puppy, that’s gonna happen. Throw it out.”
Dammit. Another one bites the dust.
So here’s the three-step process I use to snag those ideas before they evaporate.
STEP 1: VOICE NOTES
Hats off to the army of evil engineers and PhDs whose purpose in life is to comb our data and exploit our buying habits, because my algorithm is DIALED. Right about the time I got serious about writing online (a little over a year ago), the algo suggested I buy a voice recorder from Plaud.
It’s the single best investment I’ve made in my life. Full stop.
(I’m not sponsored by them. This shit just changed my life in a big way.)
Now, any time I have an idea, instead of the notebook/pen/hide-from-my-kids ritual, I just flip over my phone. Magnetically attached to the back is a device the size of a credit card with a single button. One press and I’m recording. The idea is captured.
Because the device stays on my phone, I have this thing everywhere. On the dog walks, at the soccer tryouts, in the grocery store, during the workout. My favorite place to use it has been the cold plunge, where my thoughts have 5 dedicated minutes to sprawl. I hit record and see what comes out. (I call this collection my Cold Plunge Files, and some of my most coherent ideas have come from sitting in a 46-degree tub in my garage.)
And if you’re one of those “I HAVE to write my ideas down” people, you still can. Just read it into the recorder after, so it goes into your idea ecosystem. (This matters for Step 3.)
You don’t have to use Plaud (they’re not a sponsor... yet), but you do need a solution that does both recording and transcript exports.
STEP 2: TRANSCRIPTION
Morty: Uhh, I think my voice is annoying. Is it annoying?
Rick: Yes, and it’s your best quality.
It takes a certain breed of person to enjoy listening back to their own voice. Early in my recruiting career, that’s how I got better at the job: leaving myself voicemails, pitching roles, selling my services, then forcing myself to listen back.
Do I still leave a helluva voicemail? Yes. Was it cringe central? Also yes.
In the last year, I’ve recorded well over a thousand voice notes. I haven’t listened to a single one. Transcripts, baby. I’m never going back. After I record, I generate transcripts. AI takes care of it in about 30 seconds. You can do this as you record or in a finished batch, whatever fits your style.
Now, if we were creating transcripts just to read them, we’d be building a bottleneck. We still have to be able to FIND these great ideas. And whether it’s on paper or a hard drive, we’re still relying on our overtaxed brains to do the heavy lifting. Did we date the page? What week was that? How many pages of drivel do I have to navigate to find the gem?
Same problem for transcripts. They’re auto-dated with a generated title, which is at least better than scratches in a notebook. But what am I gonna do, sit here and read every transcript to find my best ideas like an asshole? AI, baby. I’m never going back.
STEP 3: THE VOICE NOTES BRIEF
This is where it all comes together. It’s where you gather the random recordings and find the ones worth keeping.
Every two weeks, I export all the transcripts into a designated “Voice Notes” folder. I create a sub-folder with the date range (example: “Voice Notes - 6.1 - 6.14”). In go the files. Then, in Cowork, I give Claude access to the folder and tell it to run my Voice Notes Brief using the prompt below.
What I get back is a 6-12 page brief with the following:
Executive Summary: a one-page primer of everything I’m about to read.
Section 1: Insights. A page of insights and observations from the batch. I’m learning something about the texture of my mind right off the bat.
Section 2: Patterns & Themes. This is where the connective power of AI shows up. Claude tells me how many times I reference certain topics, what I’m obsessing over, what keeps coming to the surface. It’s the beginning of seeing the mosaic instead of the individual tiles.
Section 3: Action Items. Pure functionality. This is how I capture all the shit that needs to end up on my to-do list that bubbled up when I wasn’t in front of my computer.
Section 4: Gratitude. Hands down one of my favorite sections. I’m
not a guy who really celebrates wins, so I’m apt to miss them entirely. This section makes sure I don’t sprint past the good moments.
Section 5: Hand on the Shoulder. If the gratitude section isn’t my favorite, it’s because this one is. It’s the equivalent of a close friend who knows you, has the context, and says, “Hey, I don’t know if you can see it, but you need to think about this...”
These briefs keep the train on the tracks for me. Every two weeks, this rundown of all my thoughts and notes helps me remember everything I need. It also helps me see around the corners of my own mind, shows me blind spots, and nudges me in the right direction.
THE PROMPT
Here are the steps to get started:
Create a Claude project and name it “Voice Notes”
Copy and paste everything below into your Claude project instructions. You’ll want to do this in Cowork on the desktop app to be able to give the project access to your voice notes folder.
Start a new chat: “Run the voice notes brief on the folder [Voice Notes - 6.1. - 6.14)”
Claude will generate the document.
Role
You are my Voice-Note Mining tool. Each session I will paste a batch of voice-note transcripts and a short brief about the period they cover. Your job is to read everything and return a structured brief that extracts the signal across five categories. You are not a content engine. You are not a journal interpreter. You are a thinking partner whose job is to help me see what I captured in stolen moments — the ideas I had walking, the patterns I noticed driving home, the things I said out loud and then forgot. The most important section is the last one, the Hand on the Shoulder. It is the section a trusted friend with full context would write if they had been listening all week. Do not be gentle for gentleness's sake.
How to process each batch
When I paste a session brief and a batch of transcripts:
1. Read every transcript fully. Do not summarize line by line. Extract.
2. Use my actual language. Quote me directly when a phrase carries weight.
3. Do not invent material that wasn't in the transcripts. If a section is thin because the period's notes were thin, say so. A thin section is information, not a failure.
4. If you connect something across notes that I did not connect myself, mark it: "[Pattern across multiple notes, not stated directly]."
5. When people I named appear in the notes, surface what was happening and what shifted without armchair psychology. Names go in the brief; interpretations of their feelings do not, unless I made the interpretation first.
Output format
1. INSIGHTS
The sharpest, most useful ideas in this batch. Name each one, quote the source line, and explain in one sentence why it matters. Three to five items, fewer if the notes are thin.
2. PATTERNS & THEMES
Both the obvious (recurring complaints, recurring wins, recurring states) and the non-obvious (counterintuitive patterns, things I may not see myself). Be specific. Two to four items.
3. ACTION ITEMS
Tasks, follow-ups, and decisions I mentioned. Sequence them: Immediate, Next 2–4 weeks, Medium-term. If I mentioned something without a clear next step, name what would have to be true to make it executable.
4. WORTH HOLDING
Things I expressed gratitude for, or things worth holding onto consciously based on what the notes reveal. Wins, relationships, moments, the parts that are working. Do not invent this. If it's thin, leave it thin.
5. THE HAND ON THE SHOULDER
The most important section. Three to five things I am NOT seeing that a trusted friend with full context would pull me aside to say. Look for: patterns I've named but not acted on; costs I'm downplaying; opportunities I'm overlooking; risks accumulating quietly; tensions creating friction. Be honest, direct, and caring. Do NOT be gentle for gentleness's sake. This section is what earns the tool its keep. If I named something to watch for in the session brief, address it explicitly at the end: "You asked me to watch for [X]. Here's what the notes say about it this period: [specific summary with quotes]."A few bonus tips that make the exercise even more valuable:
Give your Claude project a ton of context. I built context documents around my business, my content creation, my vision, and my intellectual blueprint (things we’ll dig into in upcoming posts). The more context it has about you and the project, the more tailored the output.
Keep all your voice notes in one primary folder. This helps Claude build ongoing context as you dump more in, so it learns more about you and gets more useful over time.
Have Claude analyze the briefs. Do this once a month to track progress, resurface old ideas, and help you reprioritize. The more briefs you dump in, the more of the mosaic you’ll be able to see.
Want to see if anything fell through the cracks of your to-do list? Drop the last four or five briefs into Claude and ask it to pull out the tasks you’d previously identified.
And that’s how I went from frantically scribbling on any notebook or note card I could find to remembering every idea I have. Doesn’t mean they’re all worth remembering... but I’ve got them.
If it works for me, an exhausted husband and father of three little boys running a global team and building on the side, it can work for you.