Brain Dump — get it out of your head

The Brain Dump exists for the ten seconds between having a thought and losing it. Type it, press Enter, it is captured, the field is empty again and you are back to whatever you were doing.

No category. No project. No due date. Deciding where something goes is the expensive part, and doing it at the moment of capture is what makes people stop capturing.

Capturing

• Enter — save the thought and clear the field.
• Shift + Enter — a new line inside the same thought.

The header counts how many items are waiting: "{n} to triage".

Triage, later

When you have the head for it, go through the list:

• Make it a task — turns the item into a to-do, where you can give it a date, an energy and a time.
• Chunk it into a task — for a thought that is really a project in disguise. The AI splits it into steps and creates the task with them already inside. See AI features.
• Delete it. Half of what you dump turns out not to need doing, and finding that out later is much cheaper than deciding at capture time.

Clear all empties the list in one go, for when triage has already happened in your head.

Brain Dump vs Quick Notes

They look similar and do different jobs:

• Brain Dump is a queue. Things arrive, get triaged, and leave. An empty Brain Dump is the goal.
• [Quick Notes](/help/widget-notes) is storage. Things arrive and stay, because you will want to read them again.

If you are not sure, dump it. Moving a thought to Notes later is easy; recovering one you never wrote down is not.