---
title: "Step 3: Capture now, sort later"
step: 3
status: draft
updated: 2026-08-04
description: "An inbox with zero-friction capture and agent-assisted triage: getting a thought out of your head must cost nothing at the moment it happens."
---

A vault lives or dies on capture. The rule: **getting a thought out of
your head costs nothing at the moment it happens.** No deciding where
it goes, no formatting, no template. Those are triage problems, and
triage is later, with the agent doing the lifting.

**You've met this before.** GTD's ubiquitous capture and the
engineer's inbox-zero ritual. The agent changes the economics of the
*second* half: capture was always cheap, but triage was the discipline
nobody sustained; now it's a conversation you have once a week while
something else does the filing.

## The two halves

**Capture (zero friction, zero structure).** A thought, a link, half
an idea: append it to `inbox/` and forget it. Any channel that's
frictionless for you is correct: telling the agent mid-session
("inbox this: …"), a phone note that lands in the folder, a one-line
file. The only failure mode is a capture path with enough friction
that you don't use it. Sporadic use with zero discipline has to work.
A capture system that needs a ritual is a system you'll abandon.

**Triage (later, with the agent, one item at a time).** Weekly-ish,
the agent walks the inbox with you: for each item, file it (it
proposes where), make it a project in `active/`, park it in `later/`,
or delete it. You make calls; it does the moves
([step 2](/guides/vault/location-is-state/)'s proposal rule applies).

## Try it

<div data-example="idea-mid-work"><a href="/examples/idea-mid-work/">Interactive example: The idea mid-work →</a></div>

## Do it by hand

Today: put three loose thoughts into `inbox/` as one-liners. This
weekend: *"process my inbox with me, one item at a time: propose a
disposition for each, I'll decide."* Twenty minutes, empty inbox,
and everything landed somewhere findable.

## Or paste this into Claude

```text
Two standing behaviors for my vault's inbox. (1) Capture: whenever I
say "inbox this: <thing>", append it verbatim to
inbox/YYYY-MM-DD.md with a timestamp. No reformatting, no filing,
no questions, total cost to me: zero. (2) Triage: when I say
"process the inbox", walk every item one at a time; for each,
propose exactly one disposition (file to a location, promote to
active/<slug>/, park in later/, or delete) with one line of
reasoning. I decide, you execute, and dispositions happen as a
reviewed list, not silently. Add both behaviors to the vault's
CLAUDE.md. Show me the diff first.
```

## Watch out

- **Capture with a form**: the moment "inbox it" asks you a question
  (tags? category? title?), you've built a decision back into the
  frictionless path. Structure belongs to triage.
- **The inbox that only grows**: capture without triage curdles into
  guilt. If triage keeps not happening, shrink it. Five items per
  session is a real cadence; zero is a broken one.
- **Agent auto-triage**: tempting, wrong. Filing is deciding what
  things mean to you; delegate the moves, keep the meaning.