In a previous post I wrote about voice journalling and how talking out loud has become the way I come up with ideas to write about. That post was about the habit. This one is about what you actually do with the recordings once you have them the notes and, importantly, how to store them.
The short version: you do not leave them sitting in a folder on your phone. You process them, pull out the ideas, and store everything in one place you can go back to. Over time, you build up something worth having. A pool of real thoughts, in your own words, ready to turn into blog posts, newsletter pieces, or whatever else you write.
I call it a content hub. Some people call it a second brain. The name does not matter. What matters is that the ideas do not get lost. I will explain my workflow using Apple devices, but, I have heard good things about Otter on Android.
Step one: record a voice note on your iPhone
Open the Voice Memos app. Press the red button. Talk.
Do not plan it. Do not write a script. Just say what is in your head. A client call that went well. Something that annoyed you about a bit of software. A question someone asked you at a networking event that you did not have a good answer for. A thought you had on a walk that felt important at the time.
Five minutes is plenty. Some of my best notes are under two minutes.
When you are done, press stop. The recording saves automatically.
Step two: get the transcript
Your iPhone transcribes voice notes for you. If you do not have an iPhone, try Otter.ai – Here is how to find the transcript on an iPhone.
- Open Voice Memos and tap the recording you just made.
- Tap the three dots (the more options menu) in the top right corner.
- Select “View Transcript.”
If you do not see a transcript straight away, give it a few seconds. The app processes it in the background.
Once the transcript appears, select all the text, copy it, and move to the next step.
A note on accuracy: iPhone transcription is good, but not perfect. You will see wrong words, missing punctuation, and the odd run-on sentence. That is fine. The next step handles all of that.
Step three: paste it into Claude and tidy it up
Go to claude.ai. Start a new conversation. Paste this prompt, then add your transcript underneath it.
Here is a raw transcript of a voice note I recorded. I need two things from you, and I do not want you to write any content yet.
1. Tidy the transcript. Strip the ums, ahs and false starts, fix obvious transcription errors, and sort the punctuation so it reads cleanly. Do not change my meaning or my wording, and do not make it more formal or more polished than how I actually talk.
2. Then pull out the separate stories or ideas in it. One ramble usually holds three or four. List each one with a short title and a couple of lines summarising what it is about.
British English throughout. Here is the transcript:
[paste your transcript here]
What you get back is two things. A clean version of what you said, still in your voice, without the noise. And a short list of the ideas inside it, labelled and summarised. And, if you are really witty, you will figure something out with Claude.ai projects to help with this.
That is the useful bit. One five-minute ramble might contain three completely separate blog posts. Claude finds them for you.
Step four: paste it into your journal app
I use the Mac Journal app. It is simple, free, and does not try to do too much. If you do not have access to the Mac Journal app then just create a folder on your hard drive. Make sure each file is labelled and that is just as good, except the Mac Journal app has good search options.
Create a new entry. Paste in the tidied transcript and the idea list. Add a date. That is it.
Do this every time you record a voice note and process it. After a few weeks, you will have something genuinely useful. Not a list of topics you thought you should write about. A record of things you actually think, in your own words, with the raw material already there.
What ends up in there
To give you a sense of what this looks like in practice, here are the kinds of things that have ended up in mine.
A client story that became a post. I recorded a note after finishing a website for a pub in Knaresborough. The client had been badly let down by his previous designer. We built the whole site in under a week. I talked through what went right and why. That will became a post about what to do when a client relationship with another designer has broken down.
A tool review I kept putting off writing. I had been using a scheduling tool called cal.com for a while and had thoughts about it. I never sat down to write them up because it felt like a lot of effort. Then I recorded a five-minute voice note whilst waiting on Deliveroo. Pasted it into Claude, cleaned it up. The post more or less wrote itself from what was already there.
A question I could not answer at the time. At a local business event, someone asked me whether they needed a blog if they already had a decent social media following. I said something vague and moved on. Annoyed me for days. I recorded a voice note about it, worked through the answer out loud, and eventually contacted them by email.
Something I noticed that felt relevant. I picked up a book at Waterstones in Harrogate and the typography was so badly set I could not read it comfortably. I talked through why for a few minutes on the way home. That became a post about why typography matters in books and what the difference is between a designer who knows type and one who does not.
Why this works
Most people who try to write a blog give up because they do not know what to write about. Or they have ideas, but by the time they sit down at a keyboard the ideas have gone flat.
Voice journalling solves the first problem. You are not starting from nothing. You are starting from something you already said.
The processing step with Claude solves the second. The idea is already on paper, roughly shaped. You are not staring at a blank page. You are editing something.
The journal is the library. You can search it. You can go back to an idea from three months ago when you are ready to write it. You can see what you think about most. You can spot the patterns in your own thinking.
None of this requires much time. Ten minutes to record. Five minutes to process. A minute to paste and save.
Do it a few times a week and after a month you will have more to write about than you can get through.
One thing to know about the Claude prompt
The prompt above is written deliberately. It asks Claude to tidy, not rewrite. To find the ideas, not invent them. The reason is that the value is in your words, not in polished prose that sounds like it could have been written by anyone.
If you let an AI write your blog posts for you, they will be fine. They will also be forgettable. Your voice, even slightly rough, is more interesting than a smooth piece of text that has no particular point of view.
Use the tool to do the dull work. Keep the thinking for yourself.
