Using AI to Capture Thoughts and Ideas

The process of documenting human thought isn’t one most people think about often. Most people have a thought, write it down, and hope they do something with it later. However, the differences in how one engages in this process can lead to big differences in the output.

Documenting thought and note taking are essential tools for being an effective and efficient person. We often get distracted. In fact, multitasking can cost 40% of a person’s productivity.

The Process of Documenting Human Thought

Take, for instance, the desire to accomplish a set of goals. The act of physically writing down those goals makes it far more likely they’ll be achieved. So what about typing goals and typing thoughts? Typing has one distinct advantage over any documentation process: it’s fast. Physically, writing is slow but with more room for creativity. Transcription of verbalized thoughts is fast but inefficient and, at times, inaccurate. Saved audio or video is one of the most efficient forms, but it is hard to look back on later.

This all leaves typing as the fastest form of documenting human thought that manages to maintain nuance in the process. Yet it’s undeniable that typing can still diminish the creative process. There’s nothing that can replace the ability to draw, write, and emphasize the way that paper documentation does. Even still, there’s one form of thought documentation that gets close.

How AI Can Help You Take Notes

AI assisted typed documentation is here to help. At first, like quite a lot of AI, this sounds a bit intimidating. Is AI assisted documentation the same as AI taking an idea and writing an entire paper for you? It can be, but this obviously stifles creativity in a quite direct way. The better and more refined use that is being developed is AI as an assistant.

In practice, this means AI can help refine, clean, organize, and push ideas. AI today, for instance, can ask questions about the writing that’s already done. It can help to simply make a paper clearer and more concise, of course. More interestingly, though, it can also help to ask questions that bring new elements into the documentation process. It’s easy to get caught in mental loops and dead ends when trying to explore a deeper thought. AI won’t fill in those gaps, but it can help people look at the gaps from a new angle.

Of course, even this doesn’t quite hit the same marks as physical notetaking. The active engagement that AI can foster gets the process a lot closer to genuine creative engagement. However, there’s really nothing that beats the freeform advantages that physical documentation brings. Instead, what AI-assisted documentation offers is a balance. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s easy to look back on, easy to grow, and it fosters creativity, all at the same time. In any case, there is a big difference between writing down notes or not, as you are only 42% less likely to accomplish goals when you don’t write them down.

AI content creator tools give us a head start on a new way of notetaking. This is important because of their utility as a way to unlock these thoughts and keep up our productivity. For jotting down an idea, there’s nothing better than a phone or computer. For extensively analyzing and documenting an idea, there’s nothing better than physically writing it down. Yet, for just about every scenario in between AI, assisted documentation reigns king. It’s the most practical option for a process that is meant to promote good uses of time. Documentation of thought is important but not as important as the thoughts themselves. AI-assisted documentation helps to ensure thoughts are what is being emphasized and explored.