Fieldnotes

Fieldnotes exists because I kept losing thoughts in the gap between having them and finding somewhere to put them. It opens straight into a cursor. There is no folder to choose, no title to write, no tag to pick. You type, you close it, and it is saved.

Two seconds is a real constraint

I measured it. From locked phone to blinking cursor had to be under two seconds on the oldest device I could still buy, because past about that point I would have already decided the thought was not worth the trouble — and the thoughts you do not bother writing down are, in my experience, the ones you most wanted back.

Hitting it meant giving up the launch animation, the sync-on-open, and the onboarding screen. It meant the note list loads after the editor rather than before it. None of those were obvious decisions in a design review and all of them were obvious with a stopwatch.

Sorting comes later

Everything lands in one undifferentiated pile, and there is a five-minute review screen that shows the pile one card at a time: keep, file, or bin. Doing the organising as a separate deliberate act rather than at the moment of capture is the whole idea, and it is the part people tell me they were not expecting to like.