One Button, No Subscription: How I Stopped Losing My Best Ideas

I’m three or four miles into a run when the idea shows up. The kind that’s usually gone by the time I’m home, showered, and back at a laptop. Not this time. I click one button on the thing clipped to me, say what I’m thinking, and keep running. It’s recorded. Done.

That’s Pocket. A physical device — thin, single button, wear it wherever you want. Connect it to your phone once, and after that it just connects automatically. It transcribes what you say, gives you a summary, and hands you a read-only API to get at the data, so you can do whatever you want with it. If you want the technical details, their docs are here.

The Problem With My Own Brain

My brain forgets things fast. That’s a problem. But it’s also an opportunity.

Running, driving, in the middle of a conversation — that’s exactly when the good ideas show up, and exactly when you have no way to write them down. Pocket is the answer to that one specific gap. Nothing more, nothing less.

Three Places Where Ideas Actually Happen

• Running. Click the button, say the idea out loud, keep running. I’ve never had a problem with it.
• Driving. I used to drive three or four hours a week. That’s three or four hours of dead time you can actually use — say something, then elaborate on it later while talking with someone else.
• Meetings. Record the whole thing, get the summary afterward.

From Voice Note to Draft — Still With a Human in the Loop

Here’s the part that matters more than the recording itself: what happens after. I come back to my phone, and I have a skill that automatically catches all the new recordings. It reaches them through a combination of MCP and a small API I built myself, sitting on top of the read-only API Pocket gives you. It downloads them, drafts the article, tries to follow the same story and connect it with everything else I’ve already written — and then it stops and asks for a human review.

Because that’s my personal sign. Nothing ships until I’ve read it.

The Economics

It costs less than €100. No subscription. And it catches any language — I use it in Italian and in English, and the LLM handles the switch without me thinking about it.

Do you need a laptop open in front of you to have an idea worth keeping? I don’t think so anymore. Some of my best ones happen at mile three, going nowhere in particular.