Getting It Out of Your Head First, Sorting It Out Later
It's 11 PM, the news is on, and you think of something you need to raise with your boss tomorrow. That thought has about thirty seconds before it's gone. Whatever you do with it has to fit inside those thirty seconds, or it doesn't happen.
Capturing something and figuring out what to do with it are two different jobs, and they want two different moments. The first one is fast and happens whenever it happens. The second one is slower, and it goes better when you're sitting down with a few things at once rather than deciding on the fly.
What the fast part looks like
In maxamind, the capture bar sits at the top of the home screen, and the New Action icon is on the toolbar of every page. Type it, or hit the microphone and say it. Anything you add from the home screen lands in the Inbox project with the Anywhere context, so there's nothing to choose and nothing to name. If you haven't set the app up yet, the Quickstart guide walks through installation on every platform.
You can do more at capture time if you want to. Setting a project, a context, a priority or a due date is right there in the same step, and when you already know those things it's worth doing — that thought about your boss can be tagged to his context and marked high-priority in about the same thirty seconds. But none of it is required, and that's the part that matters. The system works when you have three spare seconds and a vague thought.
It also works when you have no signal. Capture writes to your device first and syncs to the server whenever a connection is available, so a thought on a plane or in a basement goes in the same way it would at your desk — nothing about capture depends on being online.
What the slower part looks like
Sometime later — during a coffee break, at the end of the day, whenever suits — open the Inbox and work through what's collected there. Read each item, decide what it actually means, and give it a home: a project, a context, or the recycle bin. Some of it will turn out to be nothing. Some of it will turn out to be the first step of something bigger.
Because you've been capturing all day, this session is usually short. And because you're doing several at once, the decisions come easier — sorting ten items into projects and contexts in one sitting takes less effort than making ten separate decisions scattered across a day, each one interrupting something else.
Some items won't sort neatly into a list at all. A thought that turns out to be the start of a bigger piece of work — several moving parts, dependencies you can't see yet — is often easier to think through laid out visually than written down in order.
Why keeping them apart is the point
When capture requires a decision, you start skipping it. Not deliberately — you just don't reach for the app when you're in the middle of something, and the thought stays in your head where it competes for attention with everything else already in there. A system you only use when it's convenient ends up holding a partial picture, which is exactly the thing that makes it hard to trust.
Keep the two jobs separate and the picture stays complete. Everything goes in, immediately, regardless of what it is. Then it gets sorted when there's time to think about it properly. Both halves get done well, because neither one is trying to be the other.
If you're just getting oriented, start here. For the full walkthrough of Actions, Projects, and Contexts, see the Quickstart guide.