When listening to podcasts while I’m driving to work, I often think of things that I want to expand on later. I find that if I don’t capture these thoughts right away then I’m trying to juggle remembering exactly what I want to act on later while also trying to listen to the remainder of the podcast. This is a pretty poor system because I’m not fully invested in what I’m listening to and therefore there are a lot of moments that I either have to rewind, or I restort to re-listening to part of the podcast at a later time.

My solution to this is using the Drafts complication on my Apple Watch to quickly dictate my thoughts after briefly pausing the episode. This then syncs to my iPhone, and with badge notifications on I can know that I have one new draft containing whatever my thoughts were when I was driving. Then later when I have time, I can go into the Drafts app on my iPhone or my Mac and decide what I want to do with that text specifically - whether it’s a potential blog post idea, something that I want to put into Reminders, something I want to email, etc.

For longer form thoughts when driving I have a pair of wired USB-C EarPods that I plug into my iPhone, and with the iOS 16 update there is no longer a cap on dictation time. This allows me to pause when I need to when dictating. It also helps that speaking into the microphone on the headphones seems considerably more accurate than the Apple Watch microphone.