Talk It Out: 3 Effective Ways to Capture Ideas with Your Voice

Capturing ideas might be one of the most important practices we can develop as humans.

And not just because storing our thoughts in an external system helps us remember & organise. But because getting things out of our head helps us see & think more clearly, make sense of our thoughts & create wonderful things from our ideas.

Traditionally I have captured my thoughts & ideas digitally by writing them down. I'm in front of a digital device 99% of the time & I can type pretty fast.

But recently I've been using voice to capture my thoughts.

And I'm a convert. No. I'd go so far as to say I'm not an evangelist for voice notes & capture.

In the past voice capture always felt awkward, clunky & inefficient.

Plus I always say myself as not really a 'talker' kind of thinker.

But two things made me change my mind on voice capture:

1. Transcription got REALLY good. To the point that I never actually listen to myself back, I just use the transcription (this also means retrieving voice notes is much faster).
2. When paired with AI you can make all sorts of things happen from a simple voice note.

Now I find myself using voice capture almost 50% of the time. Both when I'm out and about or just sitting at my desk.

It can take a bit of time to get over that initial awkward feeling that you are just talking to yourself. But once you do it can open up a whole new way of getting your ideas out of your head.

Here Are Three Ways You Can Use Voice To Capture Your Ideas & Insights:

1. Walking Brain Dumps

Each morning I go out for a walk. So I use the time to get everything out of my head that has come up overnight. These can be one big long brain dump or several short bursts.

By the time I'm back at my computer, the voice notes are transcribed and waiting for me to do whatever I need to do with them.

2. Making Sense Of An Idea

When I'm ready to get an idea down I will just turn on voice capture at my computer and start talking. I'll get everything out of my head that I already know, questions I have, and things I want to explore further.

Then I'll run an AI command over the transcription asking it to make sense of it all, outline it & look for anything I am missing.

3. Journaling Your Thoughts & Insights

I use a method of journaling called ​Atomic Journaling​. Rather than have one main time in the day where I journal - I jot down my thoughts all throughout the day in short bursts whenever I need to get something out of my head.

And I'll often use voice for these atomic journal entries - especially if I'm not at my desk.

Initially when I started using voice capture I felt embarrassed. I mean essentially you are talking to yourself. My voice notes were unfinished thoughts, half finished sentences and lots of ums, ah's and pauses.

But the more I did it the more at ease I felt with the process.

And because voice is a different mode or way of thinking, voice capture helps us explore our ideas and insights in different ways than if we just used writing. Which means your ideas will be richer & better by using voice in the process.

And if you want to dive deeper into building a capture system to help you get your best ideas out of your head & into the world then check out my ​Mind Like Water Mastery Workshop​. There's an entire module dedicated to building out a capture system that works for you.

If you want to start using voice capture here are a couple of apps I recommend:

​Tana Capture​. Tana is my app of choice for voice capture & note-taking. It helps to have voice & AI fully integrated into the system you also use for all the other notes in your life. With Tana Capture I can speak into my phone and have it transcribed in my Tana workspace in seconds.

If you don't use Tana or it's not for you then two other voice note apps that have caught my eye are ​voicenote.ai​ and ​audiopen.ai​.

Both allow you to speak, transcribe and have AI run different commands over the transcripts. But you'll have to manually get these notes back into whatever note-taking app you use.

Build a Voice Capture workflow into your system and see how easy it can become to get ideas out of your head at any time & any place.

Whenever you're ready to turn your unique personal knowledge into powerful ideas - here are three ways I can help:

1. Want to get Sparked like this each week? Sign up to my weekly newsletter - The Spark Newsletter where I deliver one actionable tip every Sunday to help you bring your ideas to life & share them with the world.
2. Need a place to capture ideas & insights? You might want to check out my template ​The Knowledge Hub​ where you can turn all that collected information into your own insights.
3. Want to build a system to Capture, Connect & Organise all your 'things' - then check out my ​Mind Like Water Mastery workshop​.

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