Leonardo da Vinci carried notebooks everywhere. Not to organize, categorize, or plan - just to capture. Observations, sketches, half-formed ideas. His notebooks are famously chaotic, but they became the foundation for works that changed the world.
This is the Leonardo Principle: capture everything, organize later (if at all).
The Cost of Not Capturing
Every day, you have dozens of thoughts worth preserving:
- A potential solution to yesterday's bug
- An improvement for your product's onboarding
- A connection between two unrelated projects
- A question that, if answered, would unlock new understanding
Most of these thoughts disappear. Not because they weren't valuable, but because capturing them felt like too much friction.
The cost isn't obvious. You don't know what you lost. But over months and years, the compound effect is significant. Your best thinking evaporates before it can build on itself.
Why Most Capture Fails
Traditional note-taking systems fail knowledge workers for predictable reasons:
Too slow - Opening an app, finding the right notebook, creating a new entry. Each step adds friction. By the time you're ready to write, you've lost your flow - and possibly the thought.
Too organized - Forcing categorization at capture time. "Does this belong in Work or Personal? Projects or Reference?" This cognitive overhead discourages capture.
Too isolated - Notes live in apps that don't talk to each other. Ideas captured in one context never connect to related thoughts elsewhere.
The LogMark Approach
LogMark is built on three principles from Leonardo's notebooks:
1. Capture Should Be Instant
One hotkey. One input field. Your thought goes somewhere safe. Back to work in under 3 seconds.
No app switching. No navigation. No decisions about where it belongs.
2. Structure Emerges, Not Imposed
Type t: for a task, i: for an idea, or just write. Add +project to route to a specific folder, or don't. Add #tags if useful, or don't.
The notation is optional. It adds structure when you want it, but never demands it. Just like Leonardo's notebooks - sometimes labeled, usually not.
3. Context Matters
LogMark captures where you were when the thought struck. The active application, window title, even the file you had open.
When you review captures later, this context triggers memory. "Oh right, I had this idea while debugging the auth flow."
Building Your Corpus
Fast capture isn't the end goal. It's the beginning.
Over time, your captures accumulate into a corpus - a searchable record of your thinking. Ideas connect to other ideas. Patterns emerge. Past insights inform current work.
This is what Leonardo understood: the value isn't in any single capture, but in the accumulation. A corpus that grows with you, that reflects how you think, that serves as external memory.
LogMark is designed to help you build that corpus. One fast capture at a time.