🧠 Task Capturing 101

A quick guide on remembering and following through on your commitments this back-to-routine season.

Hey there! Welcome back to The Flow by Flocus. And to the 5,427 new subscribers this week, hello and welcome 👋 If you’re new, you can catch up on our previous editions right here.

This week: We’re diving into the power of capturing your thoughts and tasks the moment they pop up — and how it will boost your productivity, focus, and memory. Let’s go!

⚡️Why Capturing Is So Important

In our last send, we talked about how to prioritize tasks effectively.

But what if you don’t have a good system for capturing and remembering tasks in the first place?

If this is a problem for you, you’ve probably struggled with:

  • Randomly remembering important tasks throughout the day, only to forget them minutes later because you didn’t write them down

  • Being distracted by less important things while in the zone

  • Missing tasks or deadlines because your list is scattered in several places

Sound like you? You’re not alone — effectively capturing tasks, ideas, and thoughts is tough, but it’s so important.

Without a good system, your critical to-dos can easily slip through the cracks, leaving you stressed and scrambling.

Having a reliable way to capture tasks means you’ll always stay on top of what’s important and reduce mental clutter.

Let’s dive into some easy ways to make capturing tasks second nature.

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Now, let's get into the 3 steps for effectively capturing your to-dos and ideas:

📫 3 Steps for Effective Capturing

Capturing a task, idea, or thought as soon as it pops up helps you:

  • File away important items without breaking your focus

  • Avoid disappointing yourself and others due to forgetting or missing a task

  • Feel less stressed and overwhelmed

Let’s take a closer look at how to do it.

📍 1. Pick a place

Ideally, this is a single, always-accessible spot to catch all your tasks, ideas, and thoughts. It can be a pocket notebook, your notes app, or a digital docs app like Notion.

Regardless of which option you choose, be sure it has lots of blank space to store everything.

🏓 2. Practice

Now that you’ve got a place to put all your brilliant ideas and lingering tasks, it’s time to use it!

Try out your capture method for a week. At the end of the week, reflect on how well the process worked.

Pro tip: Keep your capture method handy during work or focus sessions so you can jot things down without disrupting your flow state.

🧑‍🏫 3. Set yourself up for success

Capturing your tasks quickly is just one piece of the puzzle.

From here, you’ll need to review your list regularly to schedule your tasks and organize your ideas.

With this in mind, it’s a good idea to set up your capture space for easy organizing and reviewing later on.

Templates, color-coding, and other shortcuts can help you easily pick out and categorize info in a way that makes sense to you!

🪅 Flocus Picks

A curated list of things worth sharing.

  • Notion Quick Capture Method (Video) — If you’re interested in using Notion as a capture method, check out this 15-minute tutorial!

  • Dark Academia Classical (Playlist) — Set the perfect intellectual atmosphere for your capturing sessions with this dark academia-inspired classical playlist

  • How to Be a Productivity Ninja (Book) — Capturing is part of the CORD method, which this phenomenal book describes in more detail

🖥️ Flocus: Your Personal Productivity Dashboard

Execute on the ideas you capture with Flocus! Your personal productivity dash with a custom focus timer, ambient sounds, aesthetic backgrounds, built-in playlists, and lots more.

🗳️ POLL: How do you capture tasks?

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Make a habit out of capturing all the random stuff that pops up in your mind throughout the day, and forgetting things will quickly become a problem of the past!

What’s your take on capturing? Sound off in the replies and polls — we love hearing your thoughts!

Until next Sunday,

Flocus Team