It's important to bear in mind that what we're talking about here is ephemera. What makes any given nugget of information essential is entirely a matter of personal and professional priorities. Often, we don't even recognize how important a short email, a phone number scrawled on a paper napkin, or a vague five-word concept for a new product actually is until we've distanced ourselves from the fleeting first encounter with it and allowed our minds to build context around it. But if we've failed to accurately and reliably capture that idea in the moment that it presented itself, we may never get the opportunity to give it its day in the sun.

The aim here is not to completely sort and process the stuff you collect. That's something you can do later, according to your own productivity routine. The tools and practices discussed in this post are simply supposed to help you get important stuff into your system so you can deal with it appropriately when the time comes.

Voice Notes

Easily half of the important stuff that comes to my attention does so while I'm away from a computer, I don't have a pen handy, and I'm holding a cup of coffee in one hand. The one thing I'm almost never more than a few feet away from is my phone, so I use it. With one hand, I can quickly get the phone out of my pocket, launch a capture app, and speak a voice memo to lock in whatever fleeting thought I need to capture.

Android phones with Google voice recognition have the clear edge here. With my Droid, I can launch the (my favorite for managing to-do lists), speak a message, let Google's voice recognition record it into RTM, and slip the phone back into my pocket within a few seconds.