Tasks, worries, half-formed ideas, the message you owe someone, the thing you must not forget. All of it circling at once. The usual move is to capture and sort in the same breath: choose a folder, pick a tag, decide what matters. That is two kinds of thinking stacked on top of each other.
Capture is generative. You are pulling things up and getting them out. Organisation is judgement: holding options in working memory while you decide where they belong. Researchers including Scott Barry Kaufman describe these as distinct modes; switching between them on every line is tiring, and it is how you lose the thread of what you were trying to get down.
Dump first. One thing, enter. Next thing, enter. No order required. No tidying. The point is not to organise. The point is to get it out.
Working memory is for holding things briefly, not storing them. Each open loop in your head uses a little capacity. Once it is on the page, outside your head, you can stop holding it. The thought is safe. You are allowed to let go.
"When working in small startups I found that no matter what project management tool we started with, the load of organising plans and tasks while gathering the latest status, ideas and goals was too much admin work for a small team to carry. Slowly, in every startup, despite investor demands for OKRs and KPIs, everyone would drift back to simple lists and notes for their updates. In a way it was a natural move, because we would capture first and then find the simplest tool for sorting, organising and prioritising."
— A founder experience
When you are done dumping, everything is dated and sitting on the timeline. Tagging and sorting can wait until a day you have the capacity, or not at all.
Capture and organisation should not happen at the same time.
Type until the noise is on the page. First thing in the morning, or halfway through an overwhelmed afternoon. Not setup. Something you return to whenever your head feels too full to carry.