Putting the Keyboard Aside
I picked up two new AI-adjacent habits recently. They are not new apps or skills or agent workflows. They are much more basic than that: writing with a pencil and recording myself while I walk. But both have made my AI usage better.
I’ve always taken notes by hand during the day. I’ve read that writing things down helps with memory and problem solving. For me, it is calming. Listing out all the things I need to do makes them feel manageable, even when the list fills a whole page.
It also lets me draw things out in less orderly ways: arrows, boxes, little clusters of thoughts that do not need to be presentable. This has become especially useful as I spend more time working with AI tools and thinking through how data connects across them. Sometimes, in order to figure out how the solution should work, I need to draw the mess first.
Recently, I’ve especially enjoyed ditching my pens for a #2 pencil. I’ve stationed my childhood electric pencil sharpener on my desk, and there is such a specific joy in sharpening a pencil: the sound and the tiny ritual of it. Even my four-year-old son delights in using it.
At the same time, I’ve gone in the opposite direction too: I’ve started verbally recording my thoughts.
When I’m out walking the dog, I don’t really want to be typing into my phone. But walking has become some of my best thinking time. Ideas pop up. Random connections make themselves known. In the past, I’d get home and try to remember what I had been thinking about, and by then the thought had usually lost some of its shape. Now I just record myself using Wispr while I walk.
Voice lets me get a lot of context out of my head quickly: the background, the constraints, the half-formed thought, the thing I’m trying to say but haven’t organized yet.
Typing all of that can turn into a long back-and-forth where I’m slowly feeding the tool context I already had. Voice is messier, but faster. When I get home, I copy the transcript into Claude and let it help structure the mess, which is much better than trying to recreate it from memory while also avoiding an accidental command + return.
What I like about both habits is that they help me give AI better inputs.
The pencil helps me see the shape of a problem before I ask a tool to help with it. The voice memo helps me capture the raw material before it disappears.
One is slow and visual. One is fast and verbal.
Both help me process and record my thoughts. Both help me catch ideas before they disappear. And both, hopefully, will spare me from future carpal tunnel issues too.