A Week of Walking Voice Notes, One ChatGPT Prompt, One Plan

Monday on the walk to the station you had a thought about onboarding. Wednesday in the car you half-solved the pricing question, then changed your mind out loud. Friday you have twelve voice notes and a vague feeling that the week was productive. You can't say what you decided, because you never decided. You just captured.

Capture was never the hard part. The hard part is the second pass: reading everything you said this week side by side and noticing that Monday's idea and Wednesday's doubt are about the same thing. That pass takes an hour nobody has on a Friday. It's exactly the kind of reading ChatGPT is good at, once it can actually see the notes.

This is the workflow: capture with SpeakPen all week, then one review session in ChatGPT on Friday that reads everything for you.

Monday to Thursday: capture without stopping

The rule for the week is to never type and never organise. Just say it.

• iPhone: add SpeakPen's button to Control Center, or say "Record with SpeakPen" to Siri. The recording starts without opening the app.
• Android: add the SpeakPen tile to Quick Settings.
• Anywhere else: the web app at speakpen.app/app.

Each recording becomes a note with a title, a short summary, a category and the full transcript, usually within a minute. You don't have to do anything with it. Ramble, contradict yourself, stop mid-sentence. The transcript keeps all of it, and that mess is raw material for Friday.

One practical thing: the free plan is 3 notes a month of up to 5 minutes each. That's enough to try the review once, not to run it weekly. Pro is $9.9/month for 60 notes of up to 20 minutes, about two a day.

Once: connect ChatGPT (five minutes)

You do this one time.

1. In ChatGPT on the web: Settings → Security and login → Developer mode on.
2. Plugins → +, then in the New plugin form:
   • Name SpeakPen
   • Server URL https://speakpen.app/mcp
   • Authentication OAuth
3. Tick "I understand and want to continue", press Create, sign in to SpeakPen, press Allow.

ChatGPT now has three read-only tools: recent notes (by date range), search, and read a full note. It can't change your notes and never gets the audio. Setup for ChatGPT and other clients is at speakpen.app/connect.

Friday: the review, in four prompts

Open a new chat, select SpeakPen under +, and go in this order. Each prompt builds on the last, and each one names SpeakPen so ChatGPT reaches for the tools.

1. Lay it all out.

List every SpeakPen note I recorded since Monday. For each one give the date, the title, and one sentence on what I was actually trying to figure out.

ChatGPT calls the recent-notes tool with this week's dates. Skim the list. This is the first time you see the whole week at once.

2. Find the threads.

Read those notes in full. Group them by the underlying question, not by the words I used. For each group, quote the line where I came closest to an answer.

This is where Monday's onboarding idea and Wednesday's pricing doubt end up in the same group, if they belong there. The quotes matter: they're your words, not ChatGPT's paraphrase, so you can tell whether it read you right.

3. Force the decisions.

For each group, write the decision I seem to be leaning toward, the strongest argument against it from my own notes, and the one thing I'd need to find out to decide.

You'll disagree with some of these. Good. Disagreeing with a stated decision is much faster than forming one from scratch.

4. Make Monday easy.

Turn the decisions I keep into a plan for next week: at most five tasks, each with the note it came from.

Then copy the plan out. ChatGPT can't write back to SpeakPen, so the plan lives wherever you keep plans: your task app, your Obsidian daily note, a doc.

Variations worth stealing

• Monthly pattern check: "Search my SpeakPen notes from the last 30 days for anything I said I'd do. Which of those did I mention again later, and which did I drop?"
• Before a meeting: "Search SpeakPen for everything I've said about [client or project]. Give me the three points I care most about, in my words."
• Writing: "Find my SpeakPen notes about [topic] and draft an outline that uses my own phrasings as section headings."

Search returns up to 10 notes per query and recent notes up to 50 per call, so ask about a week or a topic, not your entire history.

Why this works when "I'll re-read my notes later" doesn't

The problem with voice notes was never the recording. It's that the review costs as much as the thinking did, so it never happens. Splitting the jobs fixes that. You do the part only you can do: noticing the thought and saying it out loud, at the moment it happens. ChatGPT does the part that's tedious for you and easy for it: reading twelve transcripts side by side and pointing at the overlaps. The decision is still yours, and now you have something to decide on.

Start this week

Connect SpeakPen to ChatGPT today, record whatever you think on your walks until Friday, then run prompt 1.

Setup: https://speakpen.app/connect