Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter

We all reach for tools that save us time. But used incorrectly, AI saves us time at the expense of thoughtfulness. If you had chatGPT write all your emails and a meeting bot write all your notes, you would get your work done faster, but you’d be doing a terrible job.

At Granola, our mission is to build tools that elevate you to do your best work. We... See more

The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornl... See more

Our interfaces should facilitate prose-sculpting, meaning-architecting, memory-augmenting, and inspiration-harvesting—all grounded in sources we love and trust. Just as calculators shifted math from rote computation to conceptual exploration, AI can nudge creative work toward the things humans are uniquely good at: thinking and feeling deeply.