I have a key on my keyboard that opens my notes folder. Pressing it has become something close to a reflex, the way other people reach for their phones.

The mechanic is unremarkable: a hotkey opens my editor scoped to ~/notes/, with the cursor in a fresh file named after today's date. The full latency from "I have a thought" to "I am typing it" is under a second.

The meaningful part is what this changed. When the cost of capturing a thought is high, you only capture the ones that already feel important. When the cost is low, you capture the ones that turn out to be important — but only in retrospect, and only because you bothered to write them down.

The richest notes I have are almost never the ones I expected to write. They come out of the cheap captures, the ones that I almost didn't bother with.

Useful tools are the ones that lower the activation energy of a habit you already half-have. They don't create the habit. They just remove the friction that's quietly killing it.

Related: Plain-text everything.

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