ThoughtLog

Need

Traditional note-taking apps require users to pro-actively organize their thoughts in files, folders and tags. Doing so can solicit just enough cognitive load to distract someone from externalizing just-conscious thoughts. Thoughts, by their nature, do not occur in paragraphs nor files; a “record” metaphor from databases may be a more accurate way to model thoughts and certain notes.

Process

Inspired by Notational Velocity, it takes an extreme approach to lowering interaction costs. Rather than placing your thoughts in a collection of small notes, it treats them more like records in a database that it automatically separates, sorts, filters and time-stamps, while ever-resetting the point of insertion.

This concept was tested with poets who were asked to write down streams of thought, separating each with a press of the Enter key. After which users agreed that such a tool would be a useful complement to document-based editors like iA Writer.

Solution

ThoughtLog is a conceptual experiment in placing a minimalistic interface over a record store to speed the collection and retrieval of individual thoughts.