Comment by jasonwatkinspdx
13 hours ago
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when microcassette voice recorders were a fad, and pretty much everyone found they just weren't worth it.
Psychologically there's a sort of information hoarding aspect to this. I think a lot of people experience this with browser tabs, where they don't want to read something right now, but also don't want to just abandon it. So you end up with this backlog you feel you have to hold onto.
I've learned to just trust my brain more, where if something occurs to me is important, it'll probably occur to me again when its relevant, vs me treating random momentary insights like they're a priceless treasure.
It perhaps starts to make more sense now with better AI transcribing though. For the last few decades, the idea of dictating notes has been nice; but not the reality of typing them up/processing them however yourself if you don't have a secretary.
I could sort of see myself doing this coupled with good speech to text, but I don't know if I'd do it enough that it's worth having special hardware for vs. just recording on my phone or with earphones - or getting a smart watch for this plus other functionality.
> Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when microcassette voice recorders were a fad, and pretty much everyone found they just weren't worth it.
They really were worth it if you had a secretary to transcribe the voice recordings.
I actually tried this workflow with some ebay'ed microcassette recorders - even the really compact ones are bulkier (though not necessarily heavier) than a modern cellphone, plus being non-connected you basically have to set aside some time to transcribe and erase (doable, but if you're specifically using it as a memory assist then having to remember this isn't great.) They did do a good job of "one press and they're operating, and you can confidently believe it" (but you have to pick them up in the right orientation for that to work.)
A modern digital voice recorder would have been a better choice for the experiment perhaps? Pen form factor versions exist, e.g. Olympus VP-20, Philips Voicetracer DVT1600.