Screenshots from Réka’s Setup

If you want to customize your task dashboard, watch this video!

GTD Resources
Getting things done website - https://gettingthingsdone.com/
Our documentation - https://docs.capacities.io/reference/use-cases/getting-things-done
Beth’s post about areas and recurring tasks - https://substack.com/home/post/p-197480910

Disclaimer
Getting Things Done®, GTD®, and "Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them"® are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company. This video is not affiliated with or endorsed by the David Allen Company.

Over the past couple years of developing my research practice, I’ve come to realise that a research practice is an end in itself, and not a means to an end. Sure, you could be researching for a paper, working on a doctorate, or writing an article, and your knowledge garden will help you do that. But developing a research practice as a way of engaging with the world, with yourself and the things that move you, is in my opinion, far more valuable.

My research practice is a fundamental pillar I use to move through the world. I’ve written about note-taking as a way of finding out who you are. I return to my research practice in all states of being; if I’m feeling inspired and want to learn more, and if I’m worried about something and want to dive deeper, and if I’m bored and want to disappear into a rabbit hole for a while. My research practice is a tool I have in my arsenal I know I can always turn to.

If you’re interested in developing your own research practice, I’ve put together a couple places you can start. ꩜

Start with things that shimmer

If you’ve never taken notes before, or maybe you have an empty Capacities space staring back at you, it can definitely feel overwhelming. The only way to move past this is also something most people don’t want to hear: you have to start writing things down. There aren’t really shortcuts or ways around this. You don’t need the perfect setup, or the perfect theme or plugin, or even a direction you want to go in. You just have to start writing down things that call to you.

Resonance is a muscle, and the more you flex it, the stronger it gets.

Start by jotting bullet points down in your daily notes of things that interest you, and you can turn those into objects later. I do this if I have a theme I want to research or a topic I know I want to dive deeper into. It goes into my daily note where I can process it out whenever I want to get to it.

You can also start by just saving things into Raindrop or Sublime and building your resonance filter. Beth has an amazing article about this.

Think of this step as the data collection phase. You’re hunting for information about yourself.

You can also make a mind map of all the topics you’re interested in, and link them together. I do this on paper. Go really big and broad with your topics, and then draw lines to connect any that might be relevant. My most recent one looks like this:

Connect your notes

Now that you have some notes in your Capacities space, you can start connecting them. Your notes can be anything: weblinks, images, pdfs, topic notes etc. The power of networked note taking lies in the actual connecting of the notes, so don’t be shy here. Link your notes using @ in the body of a note, or through an object property.

Below you can see I linked a weblink in the body of my Psychosynthesis topic note, and you can see the Psychosynthesis topic note under the backlinks of that weblink. Now these notes are connected!

For the most part, that’s all you need to do. Flex your resonance muscle, take notes on the things that interest you, and connect them when connections arise.

Related content catch connections for you

One of my favourite features in Capacities, and arguably one of the most powerful, is the related content feature. Sometimes you know that two notes are connected (e.g. The Way by Swann’s, the book note, is connected to ‘Marcel Proust’, the person note), but sometimes the connections are more tenuous. Sometimes it isn’t inherently clear whether two notes are connected or not, and this is where related content comes in. If you’re looking at a central note, related content will automatically find other notes in your space that are possibly related to the central note. This means that notes that could be connected, but don’t have direct connections or backlinks between them are surfaced for you to review. This way, no threads are ever truly lost.

Review your notes often

I spend probably as much time reviewing my notes as I do taking new ones. I have a regular Friday review I do, as well as a fun Sunday activity where I pull any saves from Sublime into Capacities if they are relevant.

You can also set up randomiser queries for your notes that resurface notes for you. I have a randomiser query set up for my ‘to research’ topics, and if I have time and want to take notes on something I’ll shuffle the query and pick whatever topic speaks to me on that day. Set a timer for 30 minutes and see what you can learn. Research doesn’t need to have a high barrier to entry. If you want to make it a regular practice, lower the bar.

The best way to do this is to set up some processing queries. I have a couple set up that I have embedded into a page, so they’re all there ready to go in one place.

By reviewing your notes and being critical about them, you can start to introduce a meta-practice into your note-taking, which truly turns your research into a life practice. I have a recurring task to review my processing page and go through each query.

Questions you can ask yourself

• What are the central topics I seem to be the most interested in?

• What do I think I’m interested in, but actually have taken no notes on?

  • Am I actually that interested, then?

• What do I want to spend more time directing my research towards?

I have a ‘log’ object type that I use to note down any large level systems changes I’ve made to my Capacities workflow, and this enables me to sit down and process my reflections and take action on anything that isn’t working.

Make maps as waypoints - MOCs, web weaves

Now that you’ve been taking lots of notes on many different topics, you can start to pull some of these tenuous threads together. I know many people make Maps of Content (MOCs), which can be great ways of visualising all of your content on a topic.

I personally create what I like to call ‘web weaves’ (name pending, I don’t know if it makes the most sense yet). Web weaves are broader scope than maps of content. If a map of content focusses on a singular topic (e.g. existentialism, the medieval era, bogs), a web weave is a more thematic pulling together of disparate threads.

For example, last year I happened to read a lot of books that contained themes of mouths, speech, and language. I noted that down in one of my book notes when I came to that realisation, and then this year I made a web weave referencing those novels.

You can also then take these maps and turn them into mini essays if you wanted, or into articles or presentations. You can take your research further. Or you could leave it here. The practice of having engaged with an idea, having followed your curiosity and having pulled threads together to create a new perspective is the most valuable part. Everything else that can come after is secondary.

The practice is an end in itself

The more you take notes, and the more you connect and review them, the more your knowledge garden will grow. Along the way, you’ll learn more about who you are as a person; what interests you, what excites you, what calls to you. What are you curious about but not actually spending time learning? What do you think you care about but actually don’t? This process of constant unfolding, of constant learning about myself and how I feel about the world around me and my place in it is far more valuable than a single article or a research paper I could write. A happy byproduct of my research practice for me is that I could write interesting, well cited articles about the things I am passionate about if I wanted to. But most of the time, I’m very happy taking my notes and linking them together.

Are you interested in building a research practice of your own? Do you already have one? I’d love to know!

Initially I thought I’d show you my ‘people’ type, but I think everyone probably has one of those, and the ‘societies’ type is a fun way to expand on the ‘person’ type.

Meet my ‘societies’ object type. 🎪

The societies object type originally came from my interest in mapping artists (broad term I am using for writers, painters, actors, philosophers, thinkers, etc) and their contemporaries. What circles did people move in, what parties did they meet at, where did they exchange ideas, who were they in relationships with? This is something I am so fascinated by, and what better way to map these relationships than to connect them in Capacities?

I actually have an entire dedicated ‘people’ space in Capacities separate to my main ‘fieldnotes’ one that I made for this sole purpose, but I have been slowly migrating those notes over into my main space and I will eventually deprecate the ‘people’ one.

The thinking behind the object type

At first, this object type was called ‘groups/ organisations’, but that felt clunky to me, so I spent some time thinking about what to change it to, and ‘societies’ has a nicer ring to it. Just because I am mapping societies and clubs, doesn’t mean you can’t do this same thing for companies or brands etc. This object type is super flexible! It just shows you where certain people aggregate and cross over, so you can get creative with your use-cases.

The properties & setup

For this setup to work, you definitely need a ‘people’ object type.

The main setup

As I said in my previous showcase, my object types are usually pretty simple! I like to keep things neat and tidy, if I feel like I have too many properties, it probably means I am trying to use a single object type to do too much. (An exception to this is my ‘book’ type, which has a ton of properties but they all make sense). Again, I like using text properties to make connections, and if I have used an object select property it is likely to make a two-way link to another object.

Here are the labels I have set up

A look at a ‘society’ note

Let’s take a look at a society note. Of course, I was always going to use the Bloomsbury Group as an example. The 15 year old English Lit student in me is kicking her feet right now.

Again, this is a really simple note, and I haven’t actually written anything about the Bloomsbury Group in it yet. I have added pictures from the day I dragged my boyfriend to Bloomsbury to look at the weird statue of Virginia Woolf in Tavistock Square Gardens, as well as the house Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived in, and the road that many of the members lived in. How exciting! Surprisingly, I was much more thrilled about all this than he was.

Maybe I will write some brief notes about the Bloomsbury Group in the body of the note, but the real magic is in the connections. If I go onto Virginia Woolf’s ‘person’ note, I can see she was part of the Bloomsbury Group. If I click onto the year the group was founded, I can see that in the backlinks. The true power in Capacities doesn’t always come from actually typing up notes (although that is very powerful, of course), but can be found in the connections.

I think many people would be surprised by how little time I actually spend “taking notes”. Most of my time in Capacities is spent creating new objects, filling out properties, making connections, processing my reading. Synthesis and note-taking is a final step in a very long process, which often doesn’t happen right away, if ever.

So, what now?

These connections and this data is super cool (I hope we can all agree), but how do you visualise it? Where do you take this a step further? I’m not sure how I want that to look just yet, so I don’t have an answer or an example to show you!

I am leaning towards making a map of content of sorts, or using queries to create dashboard within each ‘society’ object. We’ll see! The beauty of having this data aggregated, and these connections made, is that I can now mess around with the best way I want to visualise my notes.

Please let me know if you have any questions! Do you think you will make a similar object type, and if so what would your use-case for it be? I’d love to know :)

Today’s post is a little more technical, and perfect for those of you who want to get some of the nitty-gritty details on our personal systems in Capacities. If you’re nosey like me, you’ll enjoy this!

The beauty of Capacities is that it can work exactly the way your brain does. By creating object types, taking notes, and linking to your interests, you can create a digital garden over time that is completely unique to you.

Creating custom object types unlocks a specific power in Capacities, because it makes the system truly unique to you and the things you care about. When you start using Capacities, you get given the option of a couple object types in the onboarding, and everyone starts with the same basic types that appear as and when you need them. (For example, you won’t see the weblinks object type appear in your left-hand sidebar until you add a weblink to Capacities).

At the start of my Capacities usage, all the custom object types I created were truly literal to objects or things. I stuck to nouns. For example; books, articles, people, films, notes.

But I have since moved on from things to more amorphous object types that are loosely grounded in being. Web weavings, interactions, drafts, insights, harvests. Things that aren’t exactly things, but that capture notes of a certain type that fit well within my personal framework.

Today, I’d like to share one of these object types with you. Maybe not the most “out there”, but one I think isn’t the standard thing object type and yet one I reckon many people could add if they don’t have one already.

Meet my ‘interactions’ object type. 💬

To caveat, I have multiple spaces in Capacities. My main space is called ‘fieldnotes’, and contains my personal knowledge garden. I have a separate one for my job at Capacities, and that one has different object types to my personal one! This interactions object type is from my personal one. In my work space, the most direct comparison would be ‘meeting notes’.

The thinking behind the object type

At this point in my Capacities journey, I rarely make new object types. Whenever I do, it’s a capital-E Event, and I send Beth a text message because it feels so momentous. A lot of thinking goes into making a new object type, because often whatever it is I want to make could just be a tag. Not so with interactions.

This object started as ‘conversations’, because I started to jot down insights and notes from various conversations I was having with friends and family members. But I also started keeping notes from my creative mentorship in here, as well as online chats with people, and so changed it to ‘interactions’, which feels more fitting. I believe Chris (at nym’s notes) also calls her similar object type ‘interactions’.

The properties & setup

Most of my object types are simple.

Tip: text properties in my opinion are often the most powerful, because you can do so much with them. You can link to other notes, add timestamps, highlight and format text. I tend to add text properties rather than a property that links directly to another object unless I know that I will only have a singular use for that property (to link the interaction to a specific object type). In this case “with whom” links to my ‘people’ object type.

Most of these are pretty self-explanatory, but I will flag one that might require further explaining.

I have a two-way linked property to my ‘thoughts’ object type, where often a conversation sparks an idea or a thought, and I will create a thought and expand on it there. This also works in reverse. I want to talk to someone about a thought I had, so I link the thought to the conversation. This practice keeps all the threads between my active thinking and decision-making processes alive.

An in case you’re curious, these are the labels I have created for the different ‘types’ of interactions I take notes on.

A look at an interaction

Here is an example of an interaction. They don’t have to be too complicated! I have redacted some of the information just for privacy, but you get the gist. This simple note captures the essence of the conversation I had, who it was with, and the thoughts it sparked. How cool!

Capacities captures everything that matters to you

You can make anything into an object type. Sometimes letting go of the noun and thinking a little bigger or looser opens up an avenue in your note-taking that feels expansive. If you want to start jotting down notes on the conversations you have with the people in your life, I’d recommend you create a similar object type!

Remember, it doesn’t have to be complicated. As you saw, I didn’t even fill out all of the properties. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. But capturing this interaction in this way is enough of a spark for me to get the whole context around it. And who knows, maybe if in a year we do move to North London, I will have captured the exact day the idea occurred to me, and what sparked it.

If you have any further questions, or want me to share any more about this object type or any of my other ones, let me know! Below is a sneak-peek at all of my custom object types, many directly inspired by friends :)

Today’s research rabbit hole is about rhizomatic note-taking, which is kind of spoiling a topic I want to dive deeper into later, but I think it is an interesting thing to think about, especially if you’re wanting to dive a bit deeper into various note-taking philosophies.

This is going to be slightly abstract, and in keeping with the essence of these rabbit hole starter packs, this topic is something I am still actively researching! Imagine this as my workbench, with my scattered notes and scribbles spread out onto the table, and I am inviting you to sit with me for a little while.

So this is not a complete guide, just me sharing the launching off points I have used in the hopes that you get something out of it too. In full transparency I have also pestered my brother into downloading and sending me research papers I find on JStor as I am no longer a student. If you can exploit a student you know, I won’t stop you!

How I stumbled upon the topic

Food Relics on Substack (one of the only people I personally pay to subscribe to, I love her writing), wrote briefly about reading as rhizomatic. She writes;

Through the act of reading, these things are brought not just into relation—but in the way of Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari—rhizomatic. Glissant describes rhizomatic thought as “the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.” An enmeshed root system based on interconnectedness. Sat on the train, I can feel the rhizomes growing out around me, their twiggy arms linking together.

This image of an “enmeshed root system based on interconnectedness” sparked something in me, and a lightbulb flickered on. She isn’t talking about note-taking per se, but I realised that Capacities enables rhizomatic note-taking simply by nature of the way the app is built, through object types and networked notes.

There are multiple starting points (no one single entry node), there is an interconnected (root) network, notes that are connected are stronger than notes that exist alone, connected notes strengthen each other through context. Is this a tenuous link? Maybe. But it spoke to me.

Starting points for further reading

Rhizomatic thought as a philosophical concept was developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I haven’t read it yet but it’s on my list. (In a crazy moment of synchronicity, I learned that Gilles Deleuze co-wrote a book called Proust and Signs, which aligns with my slow read of Á La Recherche, so I will be reading that one first).

What is a rhizome?

Taken from Inna Semetsky, Deleuze, Education, and Becoming;

The underground sprout of a rhizome does not have a traditional root. There is a stem there, the oldest part of which dies off while simultaneously rejuvenating itself at the tip. The rhizome’s renewal of itself proceeds autopoietically: the new relations generated via rhizomatic connections are not copies, but each and every time a new map, a cartography. A rhizome does not consist of units, but of dimensions and directions.

In another moment of synchronicity, I have been reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and the chapter I read just last night talked about rhizomes!

The rhizomes, essentially underground stems, are a real prize. Brown and fibrous on the outside, they are white and starchy on the inside, almost like a potato, and they taste pretty good roasted in the fire.

Sure, she’s talking about cooking and eating them, but this is still a connection I can make in my notes that might serve me in the future.

Wikipedia is forever a good place to start

If you’re wanting to fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes, I encourage you to just click through the links and see where you end up. The two pages I have linked below are solid starting points.

Rhizomatic learning

Rhizomatic philosophy

This was an cool blog post:

Rhrizomapping, mindmapping

Are.na as rabbit hole

Start with one block and look at the connections, click your way through. I’ve ended up in some interesting places.

Rhizomatic learning block on Are.na

Why this is interesting

This is subjective, I guess, but rhizomatic learning/ thinking/ note-taking is so interesting to me because it feels so aligned with the way I see the world, and the way I live my life. There is often no singular thing I am interested in, no sole node or entry point into my network of notes and ideas. It supports this idea of a healthy ecosystem of interests and desires that sustain each other through interconnectedness. I wrote about Capacities holding everything I care about in a recent article;

Self-discovery is a byproduct of taking notes and engaging with the world. My notes hold so much, from bogs to my thoughts on Proust to how I felt about the second The Devil Wears Prada film (not great), which reflects that as a person I also hold so much. The world is infinitely interesting.

All of these thoughts and curiosities can coexist together, strengthening each other as well as my understanding of myself and my curiosity to learn more about the world around me. Rhizomatic note-taking is just a delicious framework to think about my existing systems in.

As I said, I plan on writing more about this in future, diving deeper into more concrete topics and how this all ties in together. In the meantime, this starter pack is a pretty accurate snapshot of my emergent thoughts on the topic. If you end up tugging on these threads and going down the rabbit hole, I’d love to hear your thoughts and where you might end up!

My notes on shipping containers and infrastructure taught me that standards are needed to scale networks and manage increasing complexity. I kept seeing that same pattern in how my Capacities usage had developed over time. Today I want to share some thoughts on object types as containers, and how object types help facilitate different kinds of thinking. They support you as you think because they provide standards to follow that speak your language. I’ll talk about some of the containers I have, or in other words, some object types.

Object types are containers with standards

Object types tell you what kind of thing is supposed to live there. The type is very clear. If I open my goal object type, I see all my goals. If I create a new goal object, I know exactly what I’m supposed to do: write about a goal. Sometimes I forget what the initial spark for creating a new object was, but luckily, in order to have created the type, I already had to decide what kind of thing it should be. That type is labelled above where my cursor is blinking at me to start typing. That gives me context right away, and it gives me a hook to get back into my thinking.

I think about the different object types in my space as different containers. They are containers for notes, and what I’ve found over time is that my list of object types has just exploded. I currently have 48, including custom and basic types. I’m very happy for my object types to expand or shrink to match the exact number of containers I feel I need at any point in time.

For a long time, Capacities was the home of my history notes and topic notes. I talked about people, places, events, eras. Those types of notes were relatively straightforward. I read about something, I linked to things, and one day I would pick a note, review the backlinks and summarise what it taught me. For me, the purpose of those object types was first to create objects for easy linking, and then to have a place where I could summarize my understanding of people, places, events, and so on. I can also add information I come across about something over time, like in this Tower of London note:

That still works, but I just don’t take those kinds of notes as much anymore because, over time, the shape of my interests and reading has changed, and therefore the shape of my Capacities space has changed too. It’s moved away from history and politics towards systems thinking, infrastructure, and more “general” things that uncover the things I take for granted around me: my kitchen taps are one example. 🚰

I’ve had many real-life lessons from this, and found myself doing much more thinking around how I can learn from this and how I can revise my internal belief systems as needed. That creates a very different kind of outcome from the history notes I used to take. I did not update my life philosophy based on notes about the Battle of Hastings. There were too many facts and too many books for me to feel I could do any original work there, so that was never my goal. With my current interests, “my original thinking” is about how I can apply what I learn directly to myself. Those different types of notes can coexist perfectly well with my notes on people or history. They just need a different kind of container, and different standards for interacting with it.

Object type deep dive: thoughts.

I work from home, so when my boyfriend gets home from work, I often like to update him on all the thoughts I’ve had. I had a couple of bigger thoughts that I was working through with him and realised that Capacities was missing out on them! Capacities already holds much of what inspires those thoughts, so detaching that from the thinking that follows felt like a real gap. I decided I needed a new container, so I made a ‘Thoughts’ object type.

I wanted it to be something bigger and more intentional than a note to self in the daily note. There is absolutely a place for daily note scribbles, but the aim of these thoughts objects is to fully think things through, get other perspectives, adjust my beliefs, and act accordingly. In other words, I wanted this thoughts object to be a very specific container for what I’m trying to do. I made a template to guide me through that. I state what I’m thinking about, then I expand on it. I use AI to show me some alternative angles because it’s really important to me that I’m not just constantly reinforcing the beliefs I already have. I want to be challenged on my beliefs. From there, I tend towards reframing thoughts and actions, and I put those into my daily note so I remember to act on them.

This whole setup is inspired by Steven Thompson, one of my favourite authors on Medium. He writes incredible pieces, and he does it with a very explicit template that consistently leads towards reframing thoughts and actions. I love that concept, so I decided this new container should have a template to help me standardise it. I gave it a couple of properties, but having the template in the blocks gives me that freeform space to think through what I’m thinking about, whilst still operating within a standard I want to maintain for myself.

Scaffolding in your own language

These different containers give me creative freedom whilst also organising my content by mode of thought. What kind of thinking do I want to do here, and what does that thinking look like? It also means I don’t have to re-decide that every time, that’s massive for me. I want to reduce my daily decision load wherever possible. It’s easy in Capacities because these standards and behaviours are literally baked into the object type. More generally, I love that Capacities considers types. It’s what pulled me to it in 2022, because we know not everything is created equal. I found blank pages so overwhelming, but these object types give me some safe structure, or cognitive scaffolding.

More than that, it is scaffolding in the language I speak. I don’t mean English, I mean Beth language. I know what “thoughts” look like to me, and the same goes for my more rogue types like loops, sparks, or metas. You name the majority of your types yourself, you craft them for the structure you need, and then you have a standardised container for the different kinds of work and thinking you do in your space.

I have no statistics for how much this improves any metrics, like how real shipping containers reduced shipping costs so magnificently, but metrics are not really the point here. Stafford Beer said that the purpose of a system is what it does, and what these containers do, for me, is make thinking more intentional and more fun. That’s what makes my note-taking practice sustainable, and one of the most important parts of my life. ❤️

Everyone is touting their “perfect setup”, many involving expensive and complicated templates, or a convoluted series of plugins to make work. You might feel like you have to buy an online course before you can even open your note-taking app of choice, in fear of making a mistake or doing the wrong thing. I’ve been there, and it can be paralysing and quite frankly exhausting.

So if you were looking for a permission slip to be messy and just get started, I’m giving you one right now.

There is no perfect setup, only one that works for you

I have been taking notes by hand since as long as I can remember, and digitally since about 2013 when I discovered Evernote in high school. I have gone through all the apps you can think of, watched most of the content out there, and have spent more money than I care to admit on Notion templates. It was only when I found Capacities that I felt like I could exhale. (I work for Capacities now, but I was using and loving the app well before I joined the team!)

All of this to say that I have gone through all the phases, tried all the things, and was very humbled when I realised most of it wasn’t working. I thought that the perfect setup would save me, and come to realise that these very shiny and polished setups didn’t do anything for me apart from create more overwhelm and open maintenance tabs in my mind, because they weren’t mine.

On picking the right app.

You might even be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choice when it comes to apps to use. My advice would be to pick the one that feels most natural and exciting to you, and start playing around with it. Take a couple notes, see how it feels to connect things. Does it feel fun and easy? Does it make you want to take more notes? Or do you feel confused and stressed? Listen to those signals and adjust accordingly. Ultimately there is no “perfect app”. Capacities is as close to perfect as it gets for me but only because the foundations align with the way I think, and because I have spent years taking notes in it and getting comfortable with how it works. Figuring this stuff out is messy by nature.

Don’t wait to have it all figured out. Start in the mess

The best, most powerful systems are ones that you create organically from the ground up, over time. We call this a bottom-up approach at Capacities. A top-down approach would be one where you download an app, install templates and plugins before ever writing a single note, or even having a clear idea of what you want to use the app for and why you’re here in the first place.

Once you start taking notes, your system will take shape around the things you’re taking notes on over time (this is why the object-based approach is so intuitive).

The perfect time to start taking notes is now. Not once you have things figured out, because you probably never will. You’ll figure things out as you go. There is no final form to note-taking, because note-taking is a process of emergence and change.

How emergence looks in practice

For me, in Capacities, this took time. At first I tried to recreate my complex Notion setup and then quickly realised that wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — work. I was also adamantly against using a single space for everything because I thought that would be too messy and too confusing, and so I created three spaces (a journal space I used to replace DayOne, my main note-taking space, and a space for writing). Over time, these spaces have merged into one giant main space, because I realised I wanted everything to connect. I thought I was allergic to the mess I am now comfortable sitting in.

I started with a couple simple object types (books, articles, people, meetings), and over time I have merged these, and then separated them again, have created and deleted them. I was surprised to see the other day that I have a total of 49 object types!

I recently started keeping a log of the changes I make to my system (inspired by Ella Nym) just so I can keep track of when and why I make certain changes. This holds a mirror up to the process of emergence. It’s easy, and it’s happening continually, even after all these years. Below is a screenshot of all the changes I made to my Capacities system in April as an example.

I am okay with my systems changing, because I know that the best systems are able to embrace change. The longer I have spent taking notes in Capacities, the more comfortable I have gotten with making changes and adapting where I have to.

Tip: It’s incredibly easy to make changes in Capacities. The ability to easily turn one object into another type with the click of a button means I’m never locked into a single way of doing something.

Real note-taking is messy

Note-taking is often the middle part of any process. It’s the figuring-it-out stage. When we are shown note-taking systems and processes online it can feel like everyone has everything figured out already and you’re left wondering why most of your notes are half-unfinished or only make sense to you.

I am here to tell you that this is normal. It’s better, even, than the alternative. Note-taking directly reflects the thinking process, which is often messy and non-linear. Your note-taking app of choice should have the flexibility and power to catch whatever you throw at it, and bend when you need it to bend.

For example, you can see here that my ‘phenomenology’ topic note is basically empty save for the definition of phenomenology, but that I have 39 mentions, 5 pieces of related content, and 3 backlinks. This means that my unfinished note is already part of an intricate interconnected system with minimal effort on my part. And that when I sit down to think more concretely about phenomenology and fill out my note (if I ever do), I have a ton of hand-curated resources and places to get started.

This was a mindset shift that took me a while to wrap my head around, because I am nothing if not a perfectionist. I want to have it all figured out, and I don’t want to make mistakes. I want my notes to all be “finished”. But once I learned to trust my systems and know they would be okay even if I messed up, and that I would be able to reorient myself when I did, everything became so much easier.

In order to be okay with the mess, you need to trust your systems

I am a big believer in trusting your systems. I don’t want to have to worry about where I put that idea about that one thing, or whether I saved the article I was reading and how to find it again. I have set my systems up in a way where I know I can trust them to handle whatever I throw at them.

You can only truly trust your setup when you have built it yourself, slowly, over time. I know, most people don’t want to hear that. You might want to have a pretty template set everything up for you and hope for the best, but I guarantee that won’t serve you in the long run. When I first started using Capacities I wanted to find templates I could use to get started, and was annoyed when I couldn’t. But I quickly realised the value in having to do the thinking and the work myself, and now my setup is completely unique to me and it works exactly how I need it to work. I never would have gotten to this point had I used a generic template.

This is not to say that you can’t take inspiration from other people. Of course you can! But take the things that work for you, leave what doesn’t, and be open to changing things around as you go.

To have the trust you need for your systems to see you through in the long-haul, you need to start from scratch and let them emerge over time.

We love chaos, but we also love maintenance

My systems are messy. A lot of my notes are completely empty, but have many backlinks. I have half-finished ideas, things tagged with ‘to research’ that I have never gotten around to researching, and notes that are basically just bullet points. This is okay, and totally part of the process.

But an equally important part of the note-taking process is maintaining your system so it continues to run smoothly. Like oiling the gears on a bike. This could be an incorrect metaphor, as I avoid riding bikes if I can.

Maintenance is not to be confused with tinkering! I love tinkering with my setup as much as the next person, but let’s not fall into the trap of believing that changing the icons for your object types, adding cover images, building dashboards, or embedding cute gifs count as maintenance. Just because you are spending time in your systems doesn’t mean you’re working on them.

Maintenance is more like processing. Making sure you’re aware of what is going into your notes, spending intentional time with new ideas and linking them to existing ones for context so that your network of notes slowly expands over time. We are exposed to so much content, get so many ideas, read so many articles, that it can become quickly overwhelming. Good systems parse this noise for you.

In Capacities you can do most of this processing with queries, and unlinked mentions and related content catches the rest automatically.

I have a number of processing queries that I make sure to go through once a week during my weekly review to make sure nothing has fallen through the cracks and that my ideas are fresh.

I also now have some handy recurring tasks in Capacities that remind me to do my processing steps every Monday so I don’t even have to remember to think about them.

You don’t need anything else: just start now

I want to encourage you to start taking notes now. Note-taking, building a second brain, tending to your knowledge garden, is an investment. Like compounding interest, it builds over time. It will grow as you add more to it and as you make more connections.

If you’ve been a little bit paralysed or overwhelmed by feeling like you have to have it all figured out to start, I’d like you to sit with that feeling of discomfort for a second and just start anyways. Trust that your workflow will emerge over time, and be okay with it changing as your needs change over time. The best systems are ones that can keep up with you, follow you, and change with you.

I used to be a chronic app-hopper, discarding setups when they stopped working and hedging my bets that the next system, the next app, the next template would make everything fall into place. I don’t do that anymore. I’ve been using Capacities consistently, every day, for over three years now. Over those three years, Capacities has slowly become my brain outside my body. Everything important to me ends up in Capacities, and I genuinely love spending time in the app. But this is only because I let myself build my workflow up slowly over time. There is no shortcut. Only the trust built by letting yourself step headfirst into the messy middle of it all and slowly working your way through it.

If any of this resonated with you, have any questions, or want us to dive deeper into any related topics let us know! :))

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Something I have been struggling with for a long time, and have only just started to feel more in control of, is feeling present. I often feel like my days pass me by, they blur together, and I couldn’t tell you what happened on Tuesday or last Thursday. I hate feeling like life is passing me by.

Social media and scrolling certainly doesn’t help, large stretches of time disappearing into the tiny overheating metal-and-glass void in the palm of my hand. I have been taking small steps to remedy this, and sometime two years ago on a whim I left my phone upstairs while reading and opened my little pocket notebook instead. The act of jotting down notes while I read, sometimes directly related to the text like copying lines and passages, writing questions that I wanted to research later, and at other times tangentially related like a memory or a thought the writing sparked. And sometimes my notes had nothing to do with the book at all, I would write about the people walking past the window, the way the sun felt on my face, the lonely-looking orchids on the dining table. Taking notes while I read felt like I was in direct conversation with the text, and with myself. I felt so rooted in the present moment; I was flowing with time rather than being swept away by it.

I started carrying my pocket notebook everywhere. The tube is one of my favourite places to take notes. There is no phone signal, and I have nothing to do but sit and observe the people around me, or spend some time in silence with my thoughts (or read, which I also enjoy doing on the tube). The London Underground is an excellent people watching space. As a writer, taking notes on the world around me, the people I see, the way I feel about things, the way condensation collects and glitters on the side of a glass of ice water in the sun, the way the neighbourhood crows caw at each other between the hours of four and six in the morning, that dog nestled beneath a patch of tulips while her owner dozes on a sun-drenched bench nearby. I collect snippets of conversations I overhear, ideas related to projects I am working on and things I want to research later.

Note-taking = choosing to be present with experience

When you are taking notes, you are actively opting into being present. You have to observe. Your senses have to be sharp and awake, alert to the wider world around you. Retreating into the 6x7 inch screen on my phone narrows the world to that size, but taking notes widens it again. Everything becomes spacious. You go from being internalised in yourself, in your own brain, or caught in the sticky web of social media algorithms to rooting yourself firmly into the world. You return to where your feet are.

And you don’t have to be a writer to take notes. You can choose to tune into the world around you at any time for the simple joy of taking note (of noticing).

My note-taking practices are all-encompassing, and are not limited to my pocket notebooks. Capacities, after three years of diligent use, literally holds my brain outside of my body. It is where all of my interests, curiosities, thoughts, and experiments come together. And because of the way Capacities is built, through object types rather than files and folders, the correlation between the real world and the notes I am taking are tangible and immediate.

A note-taking practice widens your understanding of the world while deepening your understanding of yourself

Celine Nguyen’s Research as a Leisure Activity article is brilliant, and if you haven’t read it already, I encourage you to do so! Research is a core pillar of the way I move through the world. As a perpetually curious person, having a research practice allows me to follow my curiosities rather than leave them as open questions. A note-taking practice is similar to a research practice, but perhaps less directed. If research = having a topic, note-taking = being present with experience and curiosity enough to observe and write things down.

You can take notes on anything. For example, you could be watching a film and taking notes on your reactions to the film, and jotting down how you felt about the film after. Say you loved the film and do some digging about the director, you can take notes on them. Maybe you realise that the director was inspired by a book you love, or an artist you admire. You can take notes on that too. You’ve gone from watching a film and being present with it by taking notes, to a pretty delicious rabbit hole that has deepened your understanding of the film, and why it moved you personally.

If you have a note-taking practice (especially a digital one), you can easily make connections between a theme across multiple pieces of media that you might not have found otherwise.

I can see that I have tagged these tv shows with ‘desire’, even though I never would have thought to think about Severence and Heated Rivalry in the same context at all. The only reason this connection exists, however tenuously, is because I have taken notes on them. Will I do anything with this connection? Probably not, no. But if you ever see a think piece on the relationship of desire in those two shows, you’ll know where that came from.

This is only one example. You can do the same thing with literally anything. Look at my notes on Virginia Woolf, and all the connections that spring from her.

I didn’t sit down to actively make these links, I took notes and they evolved over time.

What does this actually mean?

Note-taking is a form of practiced presence with whatever it is you’re sitting with. That’s it. You can take notes in the notes app of your phone, in a notebook, on the back of an envelope; wherever you’d like. And those notes are valuable in and of themselves purely for the act of having engaged with them.

But if you want your note-taking practice to evolve, to compound over time, I’d encourage you to move those notes into a digital system and expand on them there. Having an active note-taking process in Capacities makes me excited to engage with the media and content I come across. I want to be asking questions and following threads of curiosity because I want to take notes on things and see where I end up. The act of note-taking means I am more present, more engaged with the world around me and the things that interest me.

It means that a TikTok doomscroll can turn into a fruitful note-taking session that sends me down a research rabbit hole (I have a tag called “doomscroll destination”, and it is one of my favourites). It also means that I am consuming content with a more analytical and critical lens, looking for little moments that spark something in me that I want to chase, rather than mindlessly consuming. It means I am more aware of the things that move me, the things that interest me.

My note-taking practice roots me more firmly into my every day life, into the moments I am living now.

And so I don’t have to remember what I did last Tuesday, or what I thought of that article my friend sent me, or why I didn’t like that book I read a couple months ago. I can just look back at my notes.

Places to start

• Take notes on today’s headlines. This could sound boring but you in a year will be very interested to see what was happening a year ago today and what you thought of the news. Your ideas on current events might develop over time, and by taking note you’re inviting future you into the conversation with who you are today.

• Poetry watch. I got this idea from Anna Howard’s Substack, and have made a tag in my Capacities space called ‘poetry watch’. Overheard snippets of conversations, funny one-liners, small observations. Anything that catches my attention that feels like poetry of the mundane. I capture things quickly while out and about with the WhatsApp integration so I never have to step away from the moment.

  

• Pick a random Wikipedia page and do a deep dive. See where the Wikipedia rabbit hole takes you, and take notes. I like documenting my rabbit holes in Capacities to see where I started and where I got to as a fun meta-layer on top of my actual notes on any subject.

• Write down five things you see around you. This is interesting even if you’re not a writer, because maybe in a year’s time the five things around you in any given moment will be different, and you’ve just captured a mini image of your life right now.

• Make a list of your interests and pick one randomly to look into. Brain dump a big list of things you’re interested in, anything from broad themes to concepts, philosophical areas of thought, and super specific search terms. Pick one to spend five minutes looking up. Take some notes. You can also use a randomiser query in Capacities to surface a research topic for you. ;)