A Zin is a small thing - a unit of thinking.
It might be a single sentence, a short paragraph, or a quick bullet list — whatever shape the thought arrived in. A flash of insight after a difficult client call. A hard-won observation from a mistake you made last year. A phrase you said out loud that landed better than you expected.
None of these are content yet. They are raw material, human and yours, and a Zin is simply where one of them gets a home before it disappears.
When a Zin is added to the Zin app it can be lightly organised, but never over-structured.
You can assign it Topics, which are broad categories like client story or brain dump that help you find related thinking later. You can write #hashtags directly into the body, freeform markers that surface in your own words, in your own context.
Hashtags are a signal you give yourself in the moment.
Topics and hashtags are a way to filter Zins. Neither is mandatory, and a Zin loses nothing by having just one or the other, or none at all.
On its own, a single Zin is just a captured thought. What makes it valuable is what it becomes part of: a library that grows from two directions at once: New moments captured as they happen and older writing mined for ideas that still hold up.
Filter that library, select what’s relevant, and you have the raw, specific, human material that turns a generic AI prompt into something that actually sounds like you.
That’s the whole point of a Zin. Not the thought alone, but everything it makes possible once it’s not lost.