If you are anything like me, thoughts and ideas come at you in really the most inconvenient times. You are never at a place where you have a pen and paper. You might be on a walk, driving, or doing dishes. These are times when ideas come to me and in the past I would rely on my brain to remember it until I got to a place where I could write it down. As Im sure you can guess, this system failed me almost every time. I would get to my desk, stare at the piece of paper telling myself, “What was I suppose to write down?” I would then get frustrated at myself for not remembering the thing I thought of 30 seconds ago. 

Thats just the thing. As David Allen said, “Your brain is for having ideas not storing them”. I have tried many note taking apps and none really good at quick capture. There was always some type of friction trying to just quickly jot something down. Then, I came across an app that was exactly what I was looking for. A place where I could simply write things down. Enter Twos.

Twos is an app where you simply write things down. That’s it. That’s the app. You write things down to remember them. Something as small as, “Today I had the best burger at Smashburger” or “John’s wife’s name is Angela”. In Twos, you simply write things down. Each day, you are presented with a new daily note to write things down. This instantly clicked for me. Each day, as ideas, events, or things popped into my head, I would quickly open Twos and jot them down. An added benefit of Twos is that I can access it on whatever device I am on. Whether I am on my Mac at home, PC at work, on iOS device, I can access Twos. 

The beauty of Twos, like I said, is quick capture. It is so easy to get content into Twos. Along with just simply opening the app on my device or opening it in my browser, I have a shortcut setup called “Capture My Thoughts” (the name of the shortcut is intentional and you will see why). If I am on my Mac, I hit a keyboard shortcut and a dialogue box appears where I can enter some text, hit CMD + Enter and that thing is added to my day in Twos. (requires Twos app to be installed running on an M Series Mac)

While browsing the web, if I come across an article I want to remember to read later, I use the Twos extension to quickly add a link to the article to Twos.

If I am away from my Mac and an idea strikes, I pull out my phone and invoke the same “Capture My Thoughts” shortcut. I have this shortcut mapped to my Action Button on my iPhone 15 Pro. (If you don’t have an iPhone with an action button, you could easily have this shortcut as one of your lock screen widgets.) This way, no matter what I am currently doing on my phone, I can quickly capture a thought I have and add it to Twos.

Now, the reason I named this shortcut “Capture My Thoughts” is intentional. I did this because one of the places thoughts always creep into my head is when I am driving. Clearly, I cannot pullout my phone during this time. What I do instead is via CarPlay, I invoke Siri and say the phrase, “Capture My Thoughts”. Then I dictate my thoughts and they are added to my day in Twos. Throughout the day, I visit my day in Twos and tag certain things accordingly. From there, I can either group similar items into a list, move things into a list I have already created, or simply leave them where they are.

Then, at the end of the day, I go back to my note for the day and process what I wrote down. Tasks go into my task manager, thoughts/ideas/feelings can be moved over into my journaling app. I usually do not delete things out of Twos. Using their share feature, I simply share the thing with whatever other app I want to move that thing to.

This system has really worked for me in terms of being able to write things down quickly, get them out of my head, and into a place where I can remember them, search for them, and find them. I only scratched the surface of what Twos can do.

If you want to give Twos a try for yourself, go to https://www.TwosApp.com and use the code mbeyer when you sign up! Also, here is a link to my quick capture shortcut if you would like to use it on your Mac or iOS device.