Alright, let me tell you about this Ajeet Rai thing I stumbled upon and actually tried out. It wasn’t some big, complicated project, more like a shift in how I was handling my own little bits of work, my personal notes, that sort of thing.
I was getting really bogged down. You know how it is, notes everywhere, different apps, pieces of paper. I couldn’t find anything when I needed it. Felt like I was spending more time looking for stuff than actually doing stuff. Really frustrating.
So, I was digging around online, looking for simple ways people managed their personal knowledge or small tasks, nothing too fancy. I landed on some forum thread, pretty old, and this name, Ajeet Rai, popped up. Someone mentioned a really basic approach he used. Wasn’t even a full post, just a comment, really.
Trying Out the Simple Idea
The core idea, as I understood it from that brief mention, was super simple. Almost stupidly simple. It was about having a dedicated, single place for ongoing thoughts and tasks, but making it really low friction.
- Step 1: I set up just one single text file. Yeah, just one. I called it `ajeet_rai_*` or something simple like that, saved it right on my desktop where I couldn’t miss it.
- Step 2: The rule was: any quick thought, idea, reminder, task, anything I needed to jot down quickly and didn’t know where else to put immediately, it went into this file.
- Step 3: I just added new stuff at the top. Didn’t worry about organizing it perfectly right away. Just date stamp it maybe, and type the thought. Quick and dirty.
- Step 4: Once a day, or whenever I had a few minutes, I’d quickly scan the file. Move things out if they needed to go into a specific project folder, delete things that were done or irrelevant, or just tidy it up slightly.
Honestly, I started doing this thinking it was too basic to work. My brain usually wants complex systems. But I forced myself to just try this one-file method. I opened the file, typed a thought, saved it. Next thought, opened it, typed, saved. It took seconds.
And you know what? It kinda clicked. Because it was so easy, I actually used it. No figuring out which app to open, which notebook to grab. Just that one file. It became my quick capture inbox.
It didn’t solve all my organization problems, obviously. But it drastically reduced that feeling of ‘where did I write that down?’. That single file became the starting point. From there, I could organize things properly later when I had more time. It lowered the barrier to just getting thoughts out of my head.
So yeah, that’s my little experiment related to that name, Ajeet Rai. Just a simple text file method, probably common sense, but seeing it mentioned like that made me actually try it. And for quick capture, it’s been surprisingly helpful. Still use a variation of it today.
