A recent NYT piece argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI. It's an efficient one-two punch. If you're not brainrotting on short form video content, you're outsourcing all of your thinking to an LLM. The result is a kind of cognitive strip-mining. What's left requires active defense.

For me, one way of defending that capacity for deep work is with a pen on e-ink. Whether it's annotating a paper or starting a sketch from scratch, I'm intentionally making room for focused thought. My army of clawed Claudes and Codexes will just have to wait.

For decades, I've carried a Field Notes notebook and a pen. I mainly used them to capture ideas on the go, but it would also be great to sketch out a diagram, or to journal a little bit, especially while traveling.

Fast note-taking via the iPhone's action button has alleviated a lot of my need for quickly capturing ideas. But nothing can replace pen and paper for long form stream-of-consciousness writing or diagramming.

I wanted to give my writing a digital life alongside the rest of my notes. So a year ago, I bought an A5 e-ink writer called Supernote. I really like it so far: it's a good size, input latency is reasonable, and the overall writing experience is fine. The device provides real-time text recognition on-device and a modest cloud syncing service. I've been using their unofficial API to sync notes and bring them into my Obsidian inbox. But then something happened...

The most fruitful moments for contemplation are often the least conducive to capture. I've been working on reducing friction in capturing thoughts, feelings, and ideas wherever I may be and whatever I may be doing. At the same time, I want to stay in the moment and not get distracted by the act of capturing itself.

In addition, I want to retain control over all of this data. It should be stored in human-friendly plaintext format. It should touch as few servers as possible and come to rest on a surface that I control.

I am excited about all three of the capture methods I'm about to share with you. Three questions to whet your appetite:

1. What if you could freewrite with pen on paper and have the salient bits magically show up in my digital note corpus?
2. What if you could use your locked smartphone to type a note without ever being distracted by its contents?
3. What if you could dictate notes while walking, running, or riding a bike without even requiring a smartphone?

To motivate this, watch this quick summary of the scenarios above, and read on for some tech details for how it all works.