THE THING WE BUILT:

Important.md Extension

“I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.”

— Mitch Hedberg

I’ve used Gmail drafts as a note-taking app for years.

Have an idea? Open a draft, write it down, leave it there until you need it.

There are countless purpose-built note-taking apps in the world. I’ve tried plenty of them. I also seem to decide I’m going to adopt a new one every three months, and then I don’t.

Because the email draft is right there. Gmail is already open.

I put up a very scientific LinkedIn poll asking whether other people do this too, and it turns out I’m not alone.

There’s something interesting to me about that. In its simplest form, the platonic ideal of a note-taking app probably isn’t the one with the most features. It’s the thing you can get to fastest when you have something you don’t want to forget.

The modern-day sticky note.

For a lot of us, that’s apparently an email draft.

I’ve been thinking about that idea for a while: sometimes the best tool isn’t a new place to go. It’s putting what you need in the place you already are.

I keep a simple important.md file with notes, reminders, ideas, and whatever else I want in front of me. I like it. I just wanted to be able to edit it without leaving Gmail.

So I built a thing.

Just a markdown file to the right of your email

Gmail Important.md Extension

It’s pretty simple. My important.md file now lives in a little editor directly inside Gmail. It’s a Chrome extension that loads my notes so I don’t have an endless list of drafts.

(Well, okay, I also built an MCP for my various “Matt notes” so any agent can read important.md and a few other files. That’s a thing for another day.)

What I like about this is how small it is. It doesn’t need to replace anything or become a product. It just takes one little thing I already do and makes it work better.

I built it a few months ago almost as a throwaway, and somehow it’s become one of the tools I use most. It replaced a process that already worked, but was just a little hacky. Now my notes still live in a simple Markdown file, but I can get to them from the place I’m already in all day.

And I use it more than a bunch of “better” apps I’ve tried because it’s right there when I need it.

You don’t always need to introduce another platform or force yourself into a new way of working. Sometimes the better answer is building software around the workflow you already have.

What other hacks do you use that aren’t technically better, but work because they’re convenient?

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