Frictionless Capture: Building a System for a Brain That Won't Shut Up

I’ve never been officially diagnosed with ADHD. But I don’t need a label to observe what my brain does — and to do something about it.

The Million-Thought Problem

Here’s what it’s like inside my head: a thought arrives, and before I can finish processing it, three more show up. Each one feels urgent, interesting, worth chasing. A random observation about how trees grow sideways near the coast. A half-formed idea about distributed systems. A reminder that I forgot to reply to someone. A sudden impulse to look up the etymology of a word I just used.

Every single one of these thoughts comes with a gravitational pull. My brain whispers: attend to me. I’m interesting. I might be important. You’ll forget me if you don’t act now.

And that’s the trap. I attend. I open a browser tab. I start composing a message. I fall into a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Thirty minutes later, I look up and realize I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing I was supposed to. I’m exhausted from all the mental switching, yet the actual task I sat down to do remains untouched.

This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s not laziness. It’s a brain that treats every thought as equally deserving of immediate attention. The inability to triage in real-time is what makes it so draining — not the thoughts themselves, but the constant negotiation with each one about whether to engage.

The Core Insight: Capture, Don’t Engage

The breakthrough for me was realizing that most of the time, I don’t actually need to act on a thought right now. I just need to know it won’t disappear. The anxiety of losing the thought is what pulls me off task — not the thought itself.

So the solution is simple in theory: capture the thought instantly and get back to work. But “simple in theory” is where most productivity advice dies, because the capture mechanism itself introduces friction. If I have to open an app, navigate to the right note, think about how to organize it — that’s already enough to break my focus and send me spiraling.

The capture has to be so fast and so frictionless that it barely registers as an interruption.

What I Built

I built a pipeline using Discord slash commands that routes my thoughts to different channels based on a single decision: how “cooked” is this thought?

Raw thought, just need to get it out of my head:

/memo this reminds me of that paper on temporal cognition

Done. Private memo saved. Nobody sees it. I don’t see it. I’m back to work in under five seconds.

Thought worth sharing publicly:

/sns the best code is the code you mass delete after realizing you over-engineered it

This posts to Mastodon, Threads, and Twitter simultaneously — and automatically saves a public copy to my memos archive. One command, four destinations.

Something worth writing up properly for the blog:

/daily today I realized that the reason I procrastinate on writing isn't fear of failure, it's fear of choosing one version of what I want to say over all the others

This goes into today’s daily entry on my blog — a curated space for 3-5 sentences or a short paragraph that I’ve put some thought into.

The key design choice: Discord is a write-only channel. When I type /memo and hit enter, Discord shows me a brief confirmation — “Saved to Memos (private)” — and nothing else. No feed. No other people’s posts. No “while you’re here” suggestions. No reason to linger. The thought is captured, the urge to attend is satisfied, and I’m back to whatever I was doing.

This matters more than you’d think. When I used to capture thoughts by posting directly to social media, the capture itself became the distraction. I’d post, then check if anyone responded, then scroll for “just a minute,” then emerge forty minutes later wondering what happened. The tool designed to help me focus was actively destroying my focus.

The Architecture of Not Getting Distracted

The system has three tiers, and each one maps to a different level of cognitive investment:

The entire pipeline — from Discord to Cloudflare Worker to the various APIs — runs in about two seconds. There’s no queue, no scheduled posting, no “we’ll publish this later.” The thought leaves my brain, enters Discord, and arrives at its destination before I’ve had time to second-guess it.

And that speed is the point. The gap between “I have a thought” and “it’s captured” needs to be smaller than the gap between “I have a thought” and “I start going down a rabbit hole.” If the tool is fast enough, it intercepts the impulse before the impulse becomes a distraction.

On Not Having a Diagnosis

I want to be clear about something: I don’t know if I have ADHD in the clinical sense. I’ve never been evaluated. And frankly, for my purposes, it doesn’t matter.

What I know is this: I can observe my own behavior patterns. I can see that my brain generates an unusual volume of thoughts that each feel urgent. I can see that attending to those thoughts derails me from deeper work. I can see that the exhaustion I feel at the end of the day often comes not from hard work, but from the constant switching between half-started tasks.

Whether that pattern is called ADHD, or a personality trait, or just “how I am” — the pragmatic response is the same: build systems that work with the pattern instead of against it. Don’t try to stop the thoughts. Don’t try to be more disciplined about ignoring them. Just make the capture so effortless that the thought can be acknowledged and released in the same breath.

I think there’s something freeing about this pragmatic approach. I’m not broken. I’m not disordered. I’m a system with particular characteristics, and I can design my environment to match those characteristics. That’s just engineering.

A lot of my thinking here was shaped by Jessica McCabe’s How to ADHD YouTube channel and her book How to ADHD. She talks about working with your brain instead of against it — understanding what it needs rather than forcing it to behave like a neurotypical one. The capture system I built is a direct application of that idea: instead of fighting the impulse to chase every thought, I gave the impulse a fast, harmless outlet.

What Changed

Since building this pipeline, I’ve noticed a few things:

I lose fewer ideas. The random observations that used to evaporate now live in my memos archive. Some of them turn out to be genuinely interesting when I revisit them later. Most don’t — but that’s fine. The point was never to capture only good ideas. The point was to capture and release so I could get back to focus.

I spend less time on social media. This was unexpected. By removing the need to open Twitter or Mastodon to post, I removed the trigger that led to mindless scrolling. I still post the same amount — but I spend about 90% less time on the platforms themselves.

I feel less exhausted. Not because I have fewer thoughts, but because each thought now has a clear, instant resolution path. Instead of carrying around a mental queue of “things I want to attend to later,” I empty the queue in real-time, five seconds at a time.

The system isn’t perfect. Sometimes a thought genuinely does require more than a quick capture — it needs me to sit down and think. But those cases are rarer than my brain would have me believe. Most of the time, the thought just needs to be written down, and then I’m free.

The entire system runs on a Cloudflare Worker responding to Discord slash commands, posting to GitHub (blog), Mastodon, Buffer (Threads + Twitter), and a self-hosted Memos instance. Total infrastructure cost: $0. Yes, zero.