Hi all,

If you've ever noticed a great problem only to have it vanish from memory seconds later, this one's for you.

Today's letter is also a little shorter than normal as I'm travelling to visit family. Back to normal next week!

One of the most powerful things we can do to increase our chances of stumbling on a great problem is simply to capture more of them.

Easy! Let's just keep our eyes peeled and go hunting...

Not so fast.

I've lost count of the number of times I've noticed something that bothered me and thought 'Wow, if only someone solved that...', only to forget about it five minutes later.

To make matters worse, I think the best problems are often the ones that are easiest to forget.

By this, I mean some of the most valuable problems are the ones we're most habituated to ignoring because we're so used to not having a solution for them.

They're right under our noses, sitting just below the threshold of perception until prompted by chance.

And before we know it, they've slipped away again.

Additionally, really important problems naturally come up while we're in the middle of doing really important stuff.

When we notice a great problem 'in the wild' like this, we usually have to get right back to that important stuff we're doing, leaving time for the problem to evaporate from memory.

I think this is why startup ideas seem obvious in hindsight, but coming up with new ones feels like witchcraft.

Well, there's no blood sacrifice needed.

We just need to get better at capturing great problems before they escape.

Put down your pen

What I've found is that the specific method of problem capture makes a HUGE difference to the % of problems that actually make it into a problem log.

The enemy is friction.

The more time, effort, and thought it takes to capture a problem, the less likely you are to do it.

Even TINY amounts of friction in your capture method will add up quickly over time, and you will give up.

Here are some things I've tried. They all work for a week or two, but never hold up over the long term:

• Writing in my notebook. Grab your notebook right now. Go on, I'll wait. If it took you longer than five seconds, this system won't work for you. 
• Writing in a dedicated notebook. What if we kept a dedicated notebook for problems in our pockets all the time? If you're the kind of person who will carry an additional notebook (and a pen!) in your pyjamas, running shorts, and out to dinner, power to you! But it's not for me.
• The notes app. Despite repeated efforts to create some distance, I always have my phone within reach. The native notes app does work for problem capture, but I find the unstructured format of a blank page is prone to devolve into a general stream of consciousness, making it harder to extract and evaluate problems later. Keep your diary separate.
• Voice capture. It sounds great in theory. Look Ma, no hands! But we want to be thoughtful about capturing problems in the Subject, Goal, Friction format, which can be tricky to articulate off-the-cuff and in noisy environments.

A system for reliable one-tap problem capture

This article is not sponsored by Todoist, it's just the most reliable system I've found so far. If you have a better method, please share it!

Todoist is a great task management app.

I've used it for all my task management across work and my personal life – and across multiple devices – for about six years now.

I love it because a) it's reliable and b) I can capture tasks in natural language, automatically converting due by dates or recurring items without additional taps or clicks.

The people at Todoist are clearly obsessive about reliability and reducing friction.

Which is what we need.

The killer feature here is that you can add a task-capture widget to your phone's home screen, linked to a specific folder in the Todoist app.

Hello, one-tap problem capture.

And when it comes to evaluating our problem log, deleting the duds is as simple as ticking them off the list.

If you want to do a more sophisticated scoring analysis outside of Todoist, for example as part of a Problem Harvest, Todoist also makes it easy to export your list to a CSV.

Lastly, I highly suggest structuring problems in the SGF format at the point of capture. Not only will it reinforce good habits, but it will also alleviate 90% of the processing burden later.

Bonus tip: NO SOLUTIONS

Sometimes ideas strike before you’ve even articulated a problem.

These 'lightning strike' ideas feel amazing when they hit, but are the most at risk of turning into what Y-Combinator calls 'SISPs': Solutions In Search of Problems.

⚠️ SISPs are deadly.

Avoid them at all costs, unless you're happy to find yourself 12 months into development repeatedly hearing 'Cool, but what problem are we actually solving?' from your team and investors (if you managed to get any).

So my bonus tip is a little controversial: don't maintain a list of solutions.

You can allow yourself to note a solution down, but do it as a comment attached to a problem, and only do it in this order.

Never start with the solution.

Back to the usual format next week, but in the meantime...

Wishing you lots of problems,

Alex