MoNote
Thinking out loud, and why saying it works
Some people know what they think only once they have heard themselves say it. That is not a bad habit. It is a way of thinking, and it has one weakness.
What talking does that thinking does not
A thought in your head can stay vague. You can hold the feeling of understanding something for weeks without ever finding out whether you do. Saying it forces a sentence, a sentence needs a subject and a verb, and the gap shows up at once.
Programmers call this rubber-duck debugging: explain the problem to a toy duck, out loud, line by line, and the answer often arrives halfway through the explanation. The duck contributes nothing. The explaining does.
Talking is also linear in a way thinking is not. You can only say one thing at a time, so a tangle has to be pulled into a line to come out at all.
The weakness: it evaporates
You work something out on a walk, arrive home certain, and by the time your shoes are off you have the conclusion and none of the reasoning. A week later you have neither.
Writing it down afterwards does not fix this, because afterwards is too late. What needs keeping is the working-out, not the summary of it.
How to keep it
Record while you think, not after. Press record at the start of the walk. The recording is the thinking; there is nothing to reconstruct.
Talk to somebody specific. A colleague, your future self, the person who will inherit the project. It makes you explain things you would otherwise skip.
Say the question first. "I am trying to decide whether to…" — so that whoever listens later, including you, knows what the next four minutes were for.
End with where you got to. One sentence. If you cannot say it, you have not finished, and that is useful to know.
Where MoNote fits
MoNote is built for people who work things out by saying them. You talk for as long as it takes, up to five minutes a take. It transcribes, splits the recording into separate notes and files them, so the reasoning from Tuesday's walk can be found by searching for a word you used.
It keeps your words as you said them. A tidy summary of your thinking is somebody else's thinking.
Questions
Is thinking out loud a sign of anything?
It is a common way of working things out. Many people reason better in speech than in silence, and explaining a problem aloud is a standard technique in teaching and in programming.
Does it work if nobody is listening?
Yes. The benefit comes from having to form the sentence, not from the listener. That is the whole point of the rubber duck.
Updated