I could have used the Notes app. Or a plain text editor. Honestly, for a long time, I did.
The problem was never capture
The problem was never capturing a thought; any blank text box does that. The problem was what happened next. A thought lands in your head at the worst possible time: mid-meeting, walking to the car, half-asleep. You don't want to think about where it goes, what it's tagged, when it's due. You just want it out of your head and somewhere safe, so you can stop holding onto it and get back to whatever you were doing.
Get it out, nothing else
That's the whole job of Quick Add. Get it out. Nothing else. No decision required at the moment of capture, because the moment of capture is the worst possible moment to ask someone to make decisions.
The graveyard problem
But that's also where it gets interesting, because a pure brain dump has its own failure mode. If everything just piles into one list, the list grows and grows and you never actually go back and sort it out. It stops being a capture tool and starts being a graveyard. So there's a real tension here: make capture frictionless, but don't let frictionless capture become a place where things go to be forgotten.
A nudge, not a checkpoint
I don't think the answer is forcing structure at the point of capture. That just reintroduces the friction I was trying to remove. I think the answer is closer to a gentle nudge after the fact: quick add prompts you, later, to say when you need this and how it should be filed, and tells you why: because it'll actually help you find it again, not because the app needs it. Optional guardrails, not a checkpoint you can't skip.
Capture free, organise later
That's the shape of it. Capture should cost nothing. Organising should cost a little, but only when you're ready to pay it, and only because it's actually useful to you That's the same test, really, as whether a task app takes weight off you or quietly adds to it — Quick Add is just where that test gets applied first. — not because the app insists.