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Short, practical guides for capturing ideas with your voice and keeping them organized.

Sixteen guides for running Brain Dump day to day, grouped by what you are trying to do rather than left as a flat list to scan. Capture and shortcuts covers getting a thought into the app in the fewest possible steps: a spoken Siri phrase, one-tap Shortcuts automations, appending to a note already open, sending a stock Voice Memo over for transcription, capturing hands-free in the car or with no signal, and getting clean transcription out of the microphone and dictionary settings you actually control. Templates and organization covers what happens after capture: a daily journal template, a meeting notes format, filing notes into iCloud folders automatically, and keeping usable notes while reading a book. Sync, backup, and recovery covers keeping the notes: mirroring the folder into Obsidian, backing it up with Git so deletions are recoverable, and untangling iCloud file conflicts when two versions of a note collide.

Start with whichever group matches today’s problem. Can’t get a thought into the app fast enough: start with capture and shortcuts, most people fix that with a Siri phrase before anything else. Notes exist but are unorganized: templates and organization gets you a structure you will actually reuse. Ever lost a note or worried about losing one: sync, backup, and recovery is worth ten minutes even if nothing has gone wrong yet.

These are product how-to pages, not general journaling advice. For the science behind why a practice works, see the research summaries. For a specific journaling method like Pennebaker’s protocol or Morning Pages, see the journaling methods.