More Ideas Than I Can Work Through

By Georg Malahov

I've already written that I bought a course on launching products, and that in its chat I read through the intros of all 146 people — and a day later couldn't remember who did what or who'd be great to connect with. Same with ideas: lately they've been coming in volume, and I don't save them, don't sort them, don't work through them. They come, they go.

And on that thought I caught myself in a déjà vu. This is exactly what I was trying to build at the start of the year.

My voice journal — the Telegram bot I talk my notes into — has been called Referity since March: I renamed it when I took it to the Startbahn27 accelerator and tried to turn a personal tool into a product. The idea was precisely this: tell the bot every possible thought and idea, and it keeps them structured — sorts them, links them, remembers for me. But somehow it didn't take. I still don't fully understand why, and that's its own uncomfortable question. The conclusion I've drawn for myself is this: I apparently need to work in a more manual mode. Write down thoughts myself after meetings and calls, sit down myself later to sort and analyze. A second attempt at the automation can come later.

The funny thing is that the journal itself never went anywhere. While I spent the whole summer doing everything else, it quietly kept taking notes. The entire vacation in Croatia settled into it day by day: the wolf spiders that carry their young on their backs, the seawater desalinator made of cling film that never worked, pancakes in the mornings. The journal didn't become a product — but the habit stayed, and it runs without a single effort from me. Recording turned out to be a hundred times easier than making a system think for me.

That very Croatia, settling into the journal day by day

So here's the plan for the course now. Ideas and thoughts I keep dumping in here, into the journal — that part runs itself. The structure I'll impose by hand: set up a spreadsheet of the people from the chat — name, contact, what they do; after every call, talk through what I understood; then sit down and work through it. It's a lot of work, and none of it is about writing code — which is unfamiliar territory for me.

And the small stuff for today: cut spending on services, finally hang the shelves in the storage room, and go for a run with my daughter. The run is manual too — legs, not hands: no system is going to do that one for me.