The tiny tax on every thought
Why I built Typezz. An inbox for your brain that files itself, so you can keep going.
I used to lose thoughts to the UI.
Not to distraction, not to forgetfulness. To the interface. The moment between "I should remember this" and "I captured it" was always crowded with tiny decisions. Is this a todo or a note? Does it go in Apple Reminders or Things? Is it an event? A shopping thing? A journal line? A random idea I'll want to find in a year?
Every one of those decisions is cheap. Three seconds. Maybe less.
But there are dozens of them a day. And when the thought is already fragile, the half-formed idea, the flicker that comes between tasks, three seconds is enough to kill it.
That's the tax. Not the apps themselves. The filing.
I kept solving the wrong problem
The capture space has been a busy one. Drafts. Notion. Apple Notes. Bear. Obsidian. Roam. Things. Reminders. Each of them is beautifully engineered. Each one picks a shape (notebook, tree, graph, list) and asks you to fit your brain into it.
That's a reasonable bet when your brain produces consistent inputs. It doesn't.
Your brain produces mixed input, constantly. In the same minute, you'll have a todo, a line for the grocery list, a line for a journal you may not even keep yet, a bookmark for later, a fragment of a song you want to learn, a reminder about your dad's birthday. The app wants you to route. Your brain wants to keep going.
So I developed workarounds. One giant Notes file called "INBOX" that I never processed. A todo app full of things that weren't todos. A shame-inducing backlog of "review later" bookmarks. And when those systems collapsed, I defaulted to not capturing at all.
The thought experiment
What if the app did the routing?
Not in a smart-folder, glorified-search way. In a real way: you drop a line in, and it ends up in the correct bucket with the correct metadata. The date pulled out. The amount pulled out. The person tagged. Without you touching anything else.
The thought experiment was the whole product.
What Typezz actually is
Typezz is a single capture field. You type or speak a thought. In about 400 milliseconds, it's filed into one of twelve categories: todos, events, reminders, notes, journals, finances, health, habits, bookmarks, contacts, ideas, groceries. Relevant details get pulled out and attached.
"dentist tue 3pm" becomes an event on your calendar, next Tuesday, 3:00 PM.
"coffee run $6.50" becomes a spend entry, today.
"felt steady today, less reactive after the walk" becomes a journal line, tagged as a mood note.
"that tides podcast mia mentioned" becomes an idea, with a listen-later tag.
The categorization is boring in the best way. You don't think about it. You keep going.
The principle
Capture first. Decide never.
The design brief for Typezz is one sentence long. Every other choice follows from it. The single input field. The twelve categories (not 7, not 40). The 400ms target. The calendar and reminders sync.
The categories are opinionated on purpose. Not open-ended tags. Not user-defined trees. Twelve buckets that cover 99% of what a human wanting to remember something actually wants to remember. Enough to be useful, few enough to be trusted.
And the sync matters. An event that lives only in Typezz is half-captured. On Pro, events and reminders flow into the places you already check: your phone's calendar, your phone's reminders. The capture doesn't create yet another place to manage.
The thing it's not
Typezz isn't trying to be your second brain, or a knowledge graph, or a lifelog, or a Notion replacement. It's an inbox that files itself. It's the thing you reach for in the three seconds between having a thought and losing it.
That's the whole product.
What's next
The app is live on iOS today. Free to start with 15 classifications a day. Pro is $1.99 a month, or $17.99 a year (which works out to $1.50 a month, a 25% saving). Pro unlocks unlimited classifications plus calendar and reminders auto-sync.
On the roadmap:
- Smart daily brief. A morning summary of everything you captured yesterday, grouped by category, reviewable in ninety seconds.
- Shared lists. Groceries and todos you can hand off to your household.
- Voice in, always. A capture flow that starts listening before you reach the app.
If you've been trying to keep a system running and watching thoughts slip through, try Typezz. Let me know what you file.
More soon.