Ever get a good idea… at the wrong time—only to have it distract you from what you’re doing, and then forget it a few minutes later?
It happens to me all the time, but especially during my weekly jogging sessions.
For most of my life I wasn’t much of a sports enthusiast (or particularly fit). But over the past few years I discovered a habit that works surprisingly well for both my body and mind: jogging while listening to audiobooks.
If I only jog, I get bored pretty quickly.
If I only listen to audiobooks, I tend to fall asleep.
The habit works great, but it has one caveat. While listening to interesting ideas, my mind starts wandering to challenges at work or personal projects, building on what I’m hearing until a new idea of my own emerges. As I start shaping it in my head, I lose track of the audiobook. But if I don’t capture the idea immediately, I know I’ll have forgotten most of it by the time I get home. I end up caught in a small, frustrating conflict in my head.
A couple of months ago I came across a LinkedIn post about capturing ideas using AI. It made me realize I couldn’t be the only person with this problem. More importantly, it gave me the push to stop just living with the frustration and start looking for a solution.
So I looked for an app that would let me quickly capture ideas using speech-to-text, because stopping to type on my phone was too disruptive.
Aaaand… I found some good apps—but they were all paid and cluttered with features I didn’t need, mostly focused on meeting recording, transcription, and summarization.
So I saw it as a good opportunity to explore some recent AI technologies.
Here’s the result: BrainDump—an app built to capture ideas before they’re forgotten. No account required. All features are free, and I intend to keep them that way.
Using it has made a noticeable difference in how I experience my runs. Now, whenever an idea pops into my head, I stop for a few seconds, hit Record, speak naturally, and continue running with a clear mind. I know the idea is safe, so I can focus on the audiobook again instead of trying to keep everything in my head.
Later, when I have a few spare minutes, I review my Uncategorized ideas, polish them a bit, and add tags to move them into categories.
Then, whenever I’m working on a particular topic, I simply open that category and find all the ideasI’ve collected over time. Sometimes I use the Share function to send them all to ChatGPT, turning a collection of rough thoughts into something more structured and useful.
Because even brilliant ideas are worthless if they stay trapped in our heads.
Implemented ideas are the ones that change the world.
If this sounds useful, here’s a short intro video, as well as the download link:
I’m actively improving it, so any feedback is greatly appreciated.
Note: The on-device text processing works best on phones with at least 6 GB of RAM and a reasonably fast processor. On my Samsung S22 Ultra, 1-2 minutes thoughts processing typically take around 20 seconds, while on my inexpensive test tablet the same operation can take close to 3 minutes.
I chose to keep everything local and private rather than sending your data to the cloud, so performance depends on your device.
