Your notebook is a graveyard of great ideas—let’s resurrect them

We’ve all been there: You’re in a flow state, scribbling brilliant ideas, meeting notes, or diagrams into a physical notebook. It feels great in the moment. But then the notebook closes, and those insights are effectively lost—trapped in an analog format, unsearchable, and disconnected from your digital workflow.

Let's change that.

Welcome to Prompt, Tinker, Innovate —my AI playground. Each edition gives you a hands-on experiment that shows how AI can sharpen your thinking, streamline your process, and power up your creative work. We move beyond the hype to find practical ways to integrate AI into your actual day-to-day.

This week’s playground: Turning analog scribbles into digital intelligence

It is officially Kick-off Season. Whether you are at a Sales Kick-Off (SKO), a quarterly strategy retreat, or a massive industry conference, you are likely consuming a firehose of information.

This week, we are tackling the "analog gap." We are going to use AI not just to transcribe handwriting (OCR has done that for years), but to interpret, organize, and activate your handwritten notes.

Why this matters

There is a tension at live events. If you open your laptop to type notes, you create a physical barrier between you and the speaker. You risk getting distracted by Slack or email, and studies show you actually retain less information than when you write by hand.

However, handwritten notes usually have a fatal flaw: retrieval. They aren't searchable, they are hard to share, and they often stay buried in a notebook forever.

The solution? Don't change how you listen; change how you process.

By using multimodal AI (AI that can "see" images), you get the best of both worlds: the cognitive focus of handwriting and the searchability of digital text.

From ink to action items

This prompt can save hours of manual typing and "transcribing."

Imagine you’ve just finished a strategy brainstorming session. You have three pages of messy notes and a whiteboard full of arrows and boxes.

• The old way: You spend 30 minutes typing up a summary email, trying to decipher your own handwriting, and redrawing the whiteboard diagram in PowerPoint.

• The AI way: You snap three photos. You ask the AI to transcribe the text, interpret the logic flow of the diagrams, and format the output into a clean email summary.

This isn't just about reading text; it's about understanding the structure of your thoughts.

Your AI experiment: Try this prompt

👉 Time to tinker: Using your favorite chatbot:

1. Take a photo of a page of notes you took recently (or write a quick sample page now). Don't worry if your handwriting is messy.

2. Upload the image to the chat.

3. Paste the prompt below.

📝 Prompt: "I am uploading a photo of my handwritten notes from a recent [meeting/event/conference session]. Please perform the following tasks:

1. Transcribe: Convert the handwriting into clean, digital text. Fix any obvious shorthand or abbreviations based on context.

2. Structure: Organize the text into logical sections (e.g., Key takeaways, Action items, Quotes, Questions).

3. Digitization: If there are any diagrams or arrows, describe the relationship they are depicting.

4. Synthesize: Based on these notes, write a brief 'Executive summary' (3–4 sentences) capturing the main value of this session.

If there is any word you cannot read with certainty, mark it with [?] rather than guessing."

💡 Pro tip: Turn insights into outreach.

Once the AI has transcribed and structured your notes, don't stop there. Pivot immediately to action. Reply to the AI with this follow-up: "Based on these notes, draft a follow-up email to my team sharing the top 3 insights we need to implement immediately. Keep the tone exciting and urgent."

What did you discover?

Did the AI decipher your handwriting better than you expected? Did it pick up on the structure (lists, arrows, circled items) effectively?

Often, seeing your loose thoughts returned as a structured document reveals gaps in your thinking—or connections you didn't realize you had made.

Until next time . .

Keep tinkering, keep prompting, keep innovating.

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