One ramble, several notes
Sometimes you haven’t got a note. You’ve got a head full of them, and catching those one at a time is how you lose four of them.
You come out of a meeting, or you’re halfway home, and there are six things rattling round at once. Brain dump mode is for exactly that moment.
Using it
On the capture screen, switch the picker at the top from Note to Brain dump, then say the lot: Sarah needs the invoice by Friday, staging is throwing 500s on login, we should kill the old newsletter, book the dentist. Two minutes of it if you like, work and home jumbled together, in whatever order it falls out of your head.
Save it and the ramble comes back as separate notes, each triaged on its own with its own title, type, project and tags, all sitting in your Inbox waiting to be confirmed like anything else.
What a pause does
This is the one thing worth knowing. In ordinary capture, a couple of seconds of silence means you’ve finished and Edmund stops listening. In brain dump mode it keeps going, and treats that gap as the join between one thought and the next.
So don’t stop between thoughts. Pause for a beat, then carry on. Typing instead of talking? Leave a blank line between thoughts and it does the same job.
On older devices the pause detection is less reliable, and Edmund tells you so on the capture screen rather than quietly doing a worse job. Splitting still works, it just leans more on the words than on where you breathed.
It always errs towards keeping things
If the split goes wrong, you don’t lose the capture. A dump that Edmund can’t make sense of comes back as one note containing everything you said, which is no worse than an ordinary capture. And if the app is closed or crashes mid-way through splitting, it picks the job back up next time you open it.
Dump notes always land in the Inbox, never auto-filed and never sent onward, whatever your project settings say. One capture turning into six things that quietly went somewhere is not a surprise anyone wants.
The original transcript
The full text of what you said is kept, and each note from a dump links back to it. Open one and you’ll find a From a brain dump section listing the other notes from the same session, with a button to read the original in full. Useful when the split cut something in a place you didn’t expect.
To be exact about what’s kept: the transcript text, not the audio. Nothing you say is recorded and stored, on your device or anywhere else. Transcription happens on your device as you speak and the audio is gone the moment it’s done.
Clearing transcripts out
Transcripts are kept forever by default, on the grounds that quietly destroying the record of your own thoughts isn’t Edmund’s call to make. You can see the lot and delete any of them under Settings ▸ Data ▸ Brain dump transcripts.
If you’d rather they tidied themselves, the same screen offers automatic removal: Never, After 30 days or After 90 days. Deleting a transcript never touches the notes that came from it. They keep their content and simply lose the link back.
The setting follows your iCloud account rather than the device, because the deletions sync anyway. It would be a poor sort of setting that read “Never” on your phone while your Mac quietly pruned them.
Next: backing up your notes, or back to Help.