Somewhere to put it

You are four hundred words into your morning pages, finally saying the true thing about your week, when your brain — with impeccable timing — hands you the answer to Thursday's problem. A good one, too.

An idea in flow is a gift and a distraction in the same instant. You can't ignore it: it will hum there, underneath the writing, taking a little attention on every line until the page goes quiet. And you can't chase it either — reach for your phone to note it and the phone has opinions about what you should look at next; reach for a loose sheet of paper and you have joined the tragic tradition of loose sheets of paper, which is where ideas go to be safe and never seen again.

What you actually need is five seconds and somewhere trustworthy to put it.

How it works

Start a line with IDEA: — capitals, colon — and write the idea:

…and I think that's why the launch felt flat, we told people what it does instead of what it's for.

IDEA: rewrite the landing page around one person's Tuesday, not the feature list

Anyway. What I actually wanted to say about this week is…

That's the feature. The line stays in your entry, exactly where the thought happened; the words count toward your 750 like any others, because you did write them. Errands work the same way with TODO: — buy sandpaper has no business interrupting a paragraph about your father, and now it doesn't have to. If mid-flow even the capitals feel like effort, type /idea or /todo on a blank line and the app lays the line down for you, cursor ready.

Three in one morning? Fine. An idea is one line — everything up to the return — and the entry around it stays what it was: your writing, with a thought parked in the margin.

Finding them back

Parking only gives calm if you trust the spot. On your stats page, beneath the things you track, sits a small section called Captured: idea — 7 ideas, todo — 3 to-dos. Click one and you get the full list, newest first — every idea you ever parked, each with its date:

Sat, 18 July 2026 — rewrite the landing page around one person's Tuesday Tue, 14 July 2026 — a winter version of the walking route Sun, 12 July 2026 — ask M. about the workshop format she mentioned

Click a line and the entry opens with that exact sentence briefly lit, back in the morning it came from — which is often half the value, because the three paragraphs around an idea are usually the reason you had it. From there, copy what you need. If you want the whole list at once, each page has a one-click CSV of everything, dates included.

And IDEA: and TODO: are convention, not decree — any capitalised label with a colon collects on its own page the same way. GIFT: in November. RECIPE: when a dinner works out.

Three ways it lands

Say you make things for a living. Your morning pages are supposed to be about you, but your product keeps gatecrashing — every honest paragraph about energy or doubt shakes loose two feature ideas. You used to lose them, or worse, stop reflecting to go write them somewhere proper. Now they cost one line each. On Friday you open your idea list next to the real backlog, carry two across, and leave the rest — the journal keeps the original braindump either way.

Or you're planning a seventh birthday party. Nothing profound: a cake to order, a neighbour to warn, bunting. The errands surface while you write because that is when your head is finally quiet enough to remember them. TODO: each one and keep writing about what you were writing about. On Saturday, the list — with dates, in one place, instead of scattered across three entries you'd have to re-read.

Or there's the idea that keeps coming back. The same one, every few mornings, presenting itself as new. Your head repeats what it fears you'll lose — that's what the reminding is. The morning you write it down, it is written off: safely somewhere, findable, done being your responsibility to remember. It stops knocking. What returns instead, occasionally, is you — on purpose, to the list, to see if it still looks good.

What it will not do

There are no boards here, no statuses, no tags on your tags, no sync into your project tool. An idea does not "progress" — it sits on its line, in your words, until you come for it. This is deliberate, and it is the same deliberateness as everywhere else in the app: a journal that tried to also be your ideation tool would soon be neither. What people do next with an idea differs too much to build — the maker has a backlog, the parent has a kitchen calendar — so the handover is the simplest thing that works: copy it, or take the CSV. Capture, find back, carry out. The working-out belongs to the tools of your trade; the having-of-it-in-peace belongs here.

The head you get back

The point was never the ideas. The point is the writing, and what the writing does for you — and an unparked thought taxes exactly the attention the writing runs on. Every IDEA: line is attention returned: the thought is somewhere, you know where, and the page underneath your hands gets you back entirely.

Yes, your entry ends up a bit of a mess — reflection, then an idea about work, then bunting. So what. Life isn't any different, and the pages are a record of a head actually emptying, which is what they were for. A journal that captures your ideas doesn't become an ideas app. It becomes what it always was, working slightly better: a quiet place where, for three pages a day, nothing — not even your own good ideas — gets to interrupt you.