How I Use flomo for Everyday Observations and Product Ideas

I started using flomo in 2023. I wrote only occasionally at first, then much more often throughout 2024 and 2025. On the busiest days, I added several memos and half-jokingly imagined I was having a “cognitive awakening.”

The habit has since settled into an ordinary rhythm. I mainly use flomo on my phone and write a few memos each week. There is no streak to maintain and no requirement for every thought to become useful knowledge. It is simply an easy place to catch a thought before I know where it belongs.

I use flomo's free plan, have no commercial relationship with the company, and received no sponsorship. This is not a complete product review; it is a first-hand account of how the tool fits into my everyday workflow.

The short answer: flomo works well for my half-formed thoughts. It does not handle tasks, long-form writing, or letters in my workflow. Once a thought becomes clearer, I pass it to Reminders, Notes, Inks, or the project where it belongs.

What I record

Most of my memos fall into five loose groups.

1. Observations from ordinary life

Many entries have no immediate purpose. I notice something, and I want to keep the thought it sparks.

Once, an older passenger on a bus could not get a transit QR code to work. I usually paid with a different app, so I had to work through the unfamiliar setup on the spot. When the reader finally beeped, he turned and said, “It worked.” The memo I wrote afterward ended with a short line:

High-tech systems, little thought for people—older adults left behind.

It was not a complete argument or a proposed solution. It preserved the question the moment raised for me: technology can become more convenient without becoming equally accessible to everyone.

On another day, warm water ran from the tap while I washed my hands. I realized how much I had taken for granted: being cared for, having enough food, and being able to use clean water and hot water every day. A thought like that can disappear if I first have to invent a title, choose a folder, and decide what kind of document it should become.

2. Ideas about behavior and society

I am interested in psychology, human behavior, and other social-science topics. When I encounter an idea that stays with me—or notice a pattern in everyday behavior—I write it down in my own words.

Recording something does not mean I fully understand it, much less that it is established fact. The memo gives me somewhere to return to the question later—to check it, revise it, or reject it.

3. Small business ideas

A product strategy, a communication technique, or a small business detail that makes me pause may also become a memo. Most of these notes never turn directly into a project. They remain available until another question gives them new relevance.

4. Reading notes and short lines

I occasionally save a passage I like or write down a thought prompted by a book. Some entries are only a sentence. One of mine reads, translated from Chinese:

We never perceive time itself—only movement and a world in change.

It does not need to become an essay immediately. It is enough to keep the sentence as it is.

5. Product and feature ideas

Product ideas appear in flomo too, but I do not follow a strict capture rule. A feature idea that is concrete enough to act on usually goes straight into Apple's Reminders app. Longer material that still needs editing may move into Apple's Notes app. flomo is most useful before an idea has become a task.

What one memo captured about Inks

I could not find an early memo that I could honestly say had become a specific feature in Inks. Forcing that connection would make a smoother story, but a less truthful one.

I did find a note from 2025, when Inks was already in development and the product was changing direction. The following is translated from the original Chinese, with unrelated lines removed:

The product is now completely different from the first version. At first, I was imposing my own sense of ceremony on users. Now the experience is more restrained—closer to the logic of Live Photos. You open the camera and take a picture as usual, but when you look back later, you may find an unexpected warmth in the moment.

The camera was only an analogy. This memo did not define a feature on its own, but it captured a direction the product was already taking: recording should begin with the most natural action, and the process should appear later, when someone chooses to revisit it.

When you open a letter in Inks, you see the finished content first. The writing process appears only when you start Replay. That is the same direction the memo was trying to name, though the decision did not come from this memo alone. For the fuller product reasoning, see Why Preserve the Writing Process and How to Keep a Letter Journal.

Why I returned to simpler tools

I have tried Notion, Obsidian, and other more elaborate systems. Each tool had real strengths. My mistake was assuming that a more sophisticated system would make me more consistent.

The workflow that survived is much simpler:

For the decisions behind that handoff, see How I Use flomo, Reminders, Notes, and Inks Together.

These are not rigid boundaries. A memo may become a reminder the next day and an article later. The tools do not need to compete to become the one place for everything. I only need a natural way to move an idea from one to the next.

What flomo does well for me

The clearest strength is how little flomo asks of me before I write. A memo does not need a title, document hierarchy, or layout. flomo's official Chinese-language quick-input guide makes the same point: focus on the thought, avoid unnecessary formatting decisions, and make it easy to begin.

Another reason I keep using it is restraint. Its published design philosophy describes a quiet container with fewer colors, less decorative formatting, and less self-expression from the product itself. For me, that keeps the writing—not the editor—in view.

I also use flomo to generate share cards for posts. When I decide to share a private memo, I can turn it into a clean image without rebuilding the layout. A user story published on flomo's help site shows the same sharing option.

Another thing that stayed with me was the team's public approach to longevity. flomo's operating principles say the company maintains a reserve intended to cover seven years of server costs and essential maintenance if the product enters maintenance mode. The same page treats each annual renewal as a fresh decision by the customer. For a service holding years of private thought, that bounded promise felt more credible to me than the word “forever.”

It does not need to replace every tool

flomo's own product introduction is explicit about what the product is not designed for, including documents, tasks, and outlines, and recommends other tools for those jobs. It treats focus as a product decision, not a weakness.

This article only covers my quick-capture workflow. It does not evaluate every part of flomo's sync, privacy, or paid plans. flomo is a cross-platform cloud-sync service and supports HTML export; readers should review the current storage and export guide and privacy policy before deciding what they are comfortable storing in the cloud. That gives it different privacy and backup tradeoffs from a local-only app; neither model is automatically better.

I am comfortable writing about flomo on the Inks website because building my own product does not require me to diminish another tool's strengths. flomo works well for capturing and revisiting fragments. I use Inks for a different moment: when I want to address a thought to someone and preserve both the finished letter and the way it was written.

If a blank page feels too broad, start with 24 Journal Prompts. If I only want to catch a sentence before it disappears, flomo is usually enough. The best tool for that moment is the one I will still open next week.

8 min read · 2026-08-25 · 2026-08-25

By Wenpeng Wang, Developer of Inks.

The author has used flomo since 2023 and currently uses the free plan. This article is not sponsored, and there is no commercial relationship with flomo. Product details were checked against flomo’s official materials on August 25, 2026.