When Rockete-kun mentioned AnyType and Tana before, some friends in the background wanted me to introduce Capacities. Recently, when talking about LogSeq, another friend mentioned the introduction of Capacities as an app. I think it's really time to introduce Capacities, which is a distinctive, "soulful" note-taking product that is also favored by a certain type of user.

Considering that my main workflow is in Obsidian and LogSeq (LogSeq may change in the near future, I will write about it next time). So I found it difficult for me to introduce Capacities in depth, but almost immediately in my mind came to the idea of an author from an overseas PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) community, and I felt that she was the best fit to introduce Capacities.

This PKM community author is Beth, I've been following for a long time, she was reading books in the early days, and she also likes LogSeq / Capacities / Notion. She gave up her master's last year and recently (a few months ago) officially worked for Capacities.

Although she now has a stake in Capacities, many of her opinions have been formed since joining Capacities, including the habit of taking notes for a long time.

Today I would like to introduce one of her recent articles. It introduces both some notes and Capacities as an app.

原文位址：https://medium.com/@pkmbeth/how-i-spend-nearly-no-time-organising-my-notes-d28dc0c0fd0 作者：Beth McClelland (aka. PKM Beth)

The following text was translated and slightly edited by Rocket.

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Organizing notes is one of the main problems with PKM. You've created so many great notes, but how can you find them again? The more notes you have, the more important this question becomes.

I've struggled with this for a long time in every note-taking system I've used before. When I was in college, I used Word and OneDrive but couldn't organize my notes, and then I didn't stick to Roam Research / Obsidian / Logseq. I know I hate the "folder" structure, but I can't stand Logseq and Roam's overly free node structure. I felt frustrated.

However, when I switched to Capacities in 2024/0, I found something interesting and interesting. I've been using it for a while, and now I've been working for Capacities (Rocket King's Note: 0 H1) and use the app for a lot of things. In my conversation with Kaushik (blogger at The App Advocate), I realized that I had barely thought about tidying it up.

Then I saw a tweet from Ev (Rocket King's Note: Another PKM blogger, evielync) who mentioned that Tana's super tag provides an auto-organization feature in her life log system. This made me think that if you want to "organize your notes" without a hard time, the key may be to use an "object-based" note-taking app. That's what I want to talk about in detail today.

I'm going to use Capacities as an example because that's what I'm using, but Capacities isn't the only "object-based" note-taking software. Some of this also applies to Tana and Anytype in some ways, although each application handles problems differently. I haven't tested Tana and AnyType extensively.

I (Beth) would like to make it clear here that I am also employed by Capacities, but I wrote this article in my free time and without pay.

What is "object-based"?

First of all, I mean a kind of note (in the abstract sense). A thing that has a title, a writing position, and in Capacities, an "object" has some "properties". In Capacities, all objects (= notes) have a Type. What type of note is this? Events, people, meetings, projects? If you don't have a specific type, you can just create a "blank page".

I like "types" because it makes it easy to give an identity to my notes, which was not allowed by the previous system at Capacities. This is because this identity isn't just about putting a note in a specific folder location or tagging it with #people, but takes a more customized approach to the note type. (Note: This is the starting point for all the ideas that follow)

Let's take people, for example. If I was in my history notes space (Rocket King's Note: Beth studies history, English dynasties and monarchs and the like...... I want to know the same thing about other people so I can compare. When were they born, who were their family members, and how many years did they rule? In any other system I use, I have to remember to create this information. But I didn't do that. This has led to a lot of long-term friction, which I have already said here. (Rocket Jun Note: Think about the popular "template" function in the note-taking tool recently)

But now, I can create the identity I want by simply creating a new "human" object. This is because I've configured my Person object type to capture a "property" that captures this information (Rocket's note: it can also be understood as: meta information, a fixed field of the template...... ), and I've configured specific page layouts and even preset checkouts when linking notes (below).

In fact, in Capacities, every time we create a note, we have to choose its type. Is it a meeting, a person, or just a simple page? Specific properties are then automatically loaded based on your settings.

How can this help us?

My brain clearly likes the object-based approach to recording. For me, it makes more sense to think in terms of types than to have complete freedom to control the various notes. My own various experiments have proven this.

For example, if I think, "I wrote down a ...... Referring to ....", I have to define the noun to know the search term. These nouns correspond to my object type names.

Here are some of the terms I've set up so far:

There are very few examples in my notes where I want to write about people and something else. Because there are so few of them, when problems arise, I just ignore them, and I can't remember the specifics of these situations, which probably tells me that it's not a big deal anyway.

In addition, there is a little more useful here. If, for whatever reason, the initial object type no longer suits your note, simply change it! Nothing is set in stone, like folders, but I think many people will find it very useful in practice to give a note a more complete identity (not just its place in the folder).

Honestly, this solves most of the organizational issues I've had. I distinctly remember that I just wanted to see all my character notes in Obsidian/Logseq, but I couldn't do it without going through them one by one because I didn't define each character note as a character note. So, with no metadata to query, no search terms to look up, I just painstakingly look at each note and then add type::p erson. (Rocket King's Note: Obsidian's template and meta information editing can achieve similar effects)

However, the "capable" object-based approach makes all this much simpler. By clicking on the links in the left sidebar, I can view all of my people objects, I can also filter and sort those selections, query those notes, create static collections, and more. (Note: This is where Capacities differs from Obsidian from the very beginning)

This worked on the mechanic of "objects" on the first day I used Capacities, and has remained well scalable ever since.

What if object types don't solve all the problems?

We can make it easy to connect your notes. Mesh note-taking apps (there are many) are best suited to achieve this. If you have links and object types, there are many ways to get back to your notes. This is because associating a note with its content increases the "coverage area" you can rediscover the note.

It's not about remembering a specific file path, it's about creating multiple paths to help you find the comment (or block) you're looking for. Here's 👇️ an example

So, for me, I think an application that is both "object-based" and "web note-taking" is the perfect solution. My way to do that is with Capacities.

In the end, I feel that searching heals everything. If something I need so hard slips through the net and I can't remember the object type or its association, then searching will always solve this kind of problem. Capacities have titles, content, attributes, and maybe AI-based semantic search 👀 soon.

There's one trick I've learned from years of hating folders, though. If you can't find something right away when you search for it, but then somehow find it, rename it. Some of my file names are disgustingly long, but that's to cover the search criteria I might use. This tip is simple, but it's actually helpful to allow yourself to do so!

What about "folders"?

As you may have noticed, I didn't mention "folders". This is because Capacities it doesn't have folders.

If we know that notes can be rediscovered by "object type" (e.g., people), "search", and "links" (including tags), then it is not important to consider other organizational methods and functions.

In Capacities, we don't need to build an organizational hierarchy (i.e., a folder system) first. This is a game-changer.

Correspondingly, we only need to think about "where I want to see this note in the future" and make it appear in all of these places through links, favorites, or queries. I use these methods a lot because I like to group queries by certain attributes.

For example, in my current research project, it's very useful to be able to find a collection of all the British monarchs without having to go through each person's profile (Note: in another article, Beth is also interesting to talk about using tools to show the timeline of the English dynasty, and there is another article that ...... be discussed next time). To do this, I've just created a Collection.

I can also create automatic collections with queries. These queries collect content that matches the rules I set.

So if I want to see all the people alive in the late Middle Ages, I can create a query for that. When I fill in the relevant attributes in the character notes, they either meet these rules and appear in the query, or they don't. If I forget to fill in the attributes, I have a processing page to collect the free information. I can work on the page and then update my query.

But at least in Capacities, these collections and queries are just a layer on top of a system of typed objects that can be connected to anything. Apps focus on where content appears, not where it goes. In this sense, we never "organize our notes", we are just asking ourselves what we want to see and where, and creating the conditions (including queries and templates) to achieve this.

Write at the end

Rocket King's Note:

Beth's approach to Capacities is more like simplifying the process of post-categorization, bringing it forward to creation, which is an indexing technique that uses pre-categorization and a variety of preset methods to build indexes, which makes it easier to build indexes in batches at a later stage, or even eliminate the need to create indexes later.

But we also have to be aware that the limitations of this kind of work (at least not adopted by Rocket-kun) are that not everyone can figure out some classification and template attribute issues before the start of the note, so the input cost is quite high, but it does simplify the later organization.

Capacities are excellent, and they are a tool for J people, the kind of people who have a neatly categorized picture of what is in the drawer on the desktop. And my personal habit is (including notes) to let things grow wild first, and then classify them to a certain extent (when they can't stand it), which is the opposite 🤣 of the pre-categorization of this article...... But I still think it's important to find the right tool for you, and if Capacities is exactly what you need, that's the best.