Thanks so much for the info. Iām excited to check out Capacities. My projects are scattered between several systems. Consolidating would be awesome. I would love to see your webs so hope you decide to share them.
I use Evernote, but I'm intrigued by Capacities. I find the hierarchical structure of Evernote to be a little limiting. Sometimes I want to put a note in more than one folder. I've used other software that offers linking. I tend to go the other extreme, linking everything to everything else.
I see that import from Evernote is a future feature for Capacities, so I'll wait for that.
I have almost every email I've ever sent or received since Outlook, every financial transaction back to Quicken 1.0 for DOS (1990), every digital photograph I've ever taken, even many film that I've scanned in. I can find them all.
One of these days I'll down load birthdays from FB and pull the plug on it and IG. I'm so over them.
It's not exactly the same thing, but for most of my adult life, I've been very interested in tracking my own habitsāit's taken many forms, but the longest lasting version was a massive spreadsheet, named 'Tracking', and each sheet covered a different topic, oftentimes years' worth of self-reported data*: Restaurant Habits (where I ate, on what date, whether it was new to me or a repeat, what type of food I would categorize it as, etc); Exercise Habits (what activitees, what date, what duration); Dinner Parties hosted (including invite lists, food prepared, etc); Sexual Partners; Books Read; Movies Watched; Mountains Climbed; Travel (actually complex enough that each trip gets its own spreadsheet); Bathroom Habits; and so on...
I've often reflected on what possesses me to care, or to expend any energy at all trying to wrap my arms around what is mostly fleeting instances of a lived life. Most people just 'do' those things that I meticulously track, and never give them a second thought. And I think that's the crux of it for me...these otherwise insignificant snippets of my life are often times the clues that allow me to bring forth important memories and connections, and if those slipped through my fingers, I worry what else I would lose. So I go far outside of my way to try to hold onto the most mundane details.
* The self-reporting data part is important...I could have easily used Yelp to track restaurants, or Strava to track exercise, or any slew of other apps. But I want full and complete access to my data; I want to never worry about losing my history because some company goes out of business or wants to IPO (ahem, Reddit); and I want to be able to manipulate how I interpret my own habits and trends. Data scattered across platforms that include user-generated content simply doesn't work for my needs. With that said, I used Nara to track my baby's first year of life and whole-heartedly recommend it to any other parents. I've been able to download my data and manipulate it as I'd like, and I don't feel like my content is being used for monetization of the community owner.
Jun 20, 2023Ā·edited Jun 20, 2023Liked by Meg Conley
I use a hodgepodge of methods, none of them adding up to any real "system." I keep most emails, have a complex Dropbox system and a separate, and mostly not-redundant Google Drive system. I have piles of notes and notebooks, but I rarely go back to them. I horde papers in Zotero but can't seem to develop the meaningful habit of attaching my comments to them. I have multiple years' of spreadsheets tracking work habits and outcomes, projects, etc., plus all the academic records that are required artifacts of work at a university. I even have a file box with scraps of paper sorted by subject. But, the main things that help me to remember these days are: rocks from the places I visit (labeled with location & date), sketches of places I go amd food I eat, poetry notebooks, and my extensive (some might say excessive) photographs going all the way back to middle school and then college darkroom film and photos I developed myself. I'm going to try Capacities because I struggle with much of what you have described. (I've also heard good things about Scribner, but haven't really dedicated time to seeing if that will do the job.)
I use Evernote, and it works very very well for my brain. I've been using it for over a decade and it has SO much information: all book organization (what I've read, TBR list, who recommended what book, links to reviews, all manually cross-linked and tagged so I can find exactly what I need easily), what I've bought everyone for the past several Christmases, my permanent shopping list that is links to things I think would be helpful or pretty to buy for me/my house but which aren't requirements, records of recommendations from internet threads, interesting articles, pictures of boxes of things I've bought so I can toss the actual box but have the information contained on the box, etc.
My brain doesn't really work in a "web" way -- those brainstorm web things we had to do as kids never worked as well as neat bullet points for me -- but I'm excited that there's a "web" solution for you and for anyone else who would find it useful!
Iām grateful for this little peek into how your glorious brain works!
Like others here, Iāve been using Evernote for a decade, but lately Iāve started feeling that Iām pushing up against its limits. Maybe Iāll give Capacities a try!
I started in Evernote in 2009. But then I felt like it wasn't evolving and I wanted more so I tried Notion, Milanote, and then Zoho Notes before I came back to Evernote. My favorite was Milanote for the flexibility in how I set everything up. Just signed up for Capacities to try it out!
I've kept a zettelkasten in Obsidian for the past couple of years, and I love it. I write articles and give talks a few times a year, and it helps so much with that. My next project is turning the more polished notes into a "digital garden," that can be shared publicly. Not so much for "content creation," but because I think it's a better picture of my whole professional thing than my LinkedIn or whatever. The real game-changer of the zettelkasten method for me was rephrasing ideas in your own words instead of just collecting highlights and snippets endlessly. It makes them so much more usable.
The timing on your post is crazy. Last night, I made my first ever Reddit post (Iāve barely lurked over there, itās too scary for me for some reason) in r/Zettlekasten. I asked if anyone had used Scrintal yet because my index card Zettlekasten is just not working out for me and I want an app that has beautiful UX. I havenāt even heard of Capacities yet, but Iām so excited to check it out now! Itās funny how the universe just plops things in front of us sometimes, isnāt it? š
Maybe iām overly thinking my thoughts (or overly judging them), but I keep Notion for all of my silly little keeping track of things thoughts and Obsidian for my āthis is an important thought that I need to weave together with other thoughtsā thoughts. Iāll let you guess which one is busier š«
Arghhh! The item on my calendar for literally right now* is "Learn Notion and Port Everything Over." Meaning, take my Evernote, my Apple Notes that I never liked, my Google Tasks and briefly used Google Keep and maybe some Docs, a bunch of loose Stickies and Word docs in project folders, my Bookmarks (Firefox, Chrome, and legacy), my To-Doist, some Miro boards, maybe even my Zotero and--no, surely not--Scrivener, and get them all in one place. I know, it's the dream of the killer app, the singularity, the Apple Orb that will one day do everything. Each of those others was supposed to be that. But I really do need something to hold together what my brain cannot, and the way you describe Capacities--I guess I am now chasing yet another shiny orb. Thanks, sarcastically and for real.
*because one ADHD strategy is to block out every little task on my calendar, even though almost every one inevitably gets shifted to Friday so that Friday is just a cascade of blue by the time it arrives
Thoughts in my brain look like a 3D constellation, too. I apparently think associatively, rather than linearly.
I do use lined notebooks, though. In my good notebook I write the things that I accomplished that day, the good things I saw and experienced. I didnāt expect to ever look at them again; they help me on the day itself to weight the positive things more. But I have been looking things up too.
Better than top-down for me is turning the entire page into a visual space. I put circles or squares around elements to separate them. I can draw lines to connect them. And sometimes colors to sort ideas/connections or differentiate voices.
Computer: These folders help me immensely:
Books. I put screenshots of books/media that I run across or that others recommend.
Make Things. Screenshots/pics with elements of things Iād like to make.
What Is an Image? After Lynda Barry. Screenshots of all the things I see that make me think, or see the world differently. Words/images both. This folder gives me a new random desktop background every 30 minutes. I like the surprise.
When I set about making something, I tend to turn to the unsorted materials first. Which speaks, in my case, more for not sorting.
I've been using Pinterest to organize my rabbit hole dives. It's clumsy, and I'm always aware how intensely its being scruntinzed by the relentless $$grinder but I also let that algorithm churn up things that enhance my initial interest. It's a constant opportunity to train myself to keep focus and pick out what works and not get distracted by extraneous bright lights.
I'm so confused about even getting started with a system like this. You have to import everything in and tag it by hand? That seems utterly overwhelming.
I guess this would be a use case I'd love to see for AI. If I could dump everything into a system like this and have some MT/AI driven spiders crawl it, and ask me what it is, I might be able to start. But it just looks totally overwhelming.
Thanks so much for the info. Iām excited to check out Capacities. My projects are scattered between several systems. Consolidating would be awesome. I would love to see your webs so hope you decide to share them.
I use Evernote, but I'm intrigued by Capacities. I find the hierarchical structure of Evernote to be a little limiting. Sometimes I want to put a note in more than one folder. I've used other software that offers linking. I tend to go the other extreme, linking everything to everything else.
I see that import from Evernote is a future feature for Capacities, so I'll wait for that.
I have almost every email I've ever sent or received since Outlook, every financial transaction back to Quicken 1.0 for DOS (1990), every digital photograph I've ever taken, even many film that I've scanned in. I can find them all.
One of these days I'll down load birthdays from FB and pull the plug on it and IG. I'm so over them.
It's not exactly the same thing, but for most of my adult life, I've been very interested in tracking my own habitsāit's taken many forms, but the longest lasting version was a massive spreadsheet, named 'Tracking', and each sheet covered a different topic, oftentimes years' worth of self-reported data*: Restaurant Habits (where I ate, on what date, whether it was new to me or a repeat, what type of food I would categorize it as, etc); Exercise Habits (what activitees, what date, what duration); Dinner Parties hosted (including invite lists, food prepared, etc); Sexual Partners; Books Read; Movies Watched; Mountains Climbed; Travel (actually complex enough that each trip gets its own spreadsheet); Bathroom Habits; and so on...
I've often reflected on what possesses me to care, or to expend any energy at all trying to wrap my arms around what is mostly fleeting instances of a lived life. Most people just 'do' those things that I meticulously track, and never give them a second thought. And I think that's the crux of it for me...these otherwise insignificant snippets of my life are often times the clues that allow me to bring forth important memories and connections, and if those slipped through my fingers, I worry what else I would lose. So I go far outside of my way to try to hold onto the most mundane details.
* The self-reporting data part is important...I could have easily used Yelp to track restaurants, or Strava to track exercise, or any slew of other apps. But I want full and complete access to my data; I want to never worry about losing my history because some company goes out of business or wants to IPO (ahem, Reddit); and I want to be able to manipulate how I interpret my own habits and trends. Data scattered across platforms that include user-generated content simply doesn't work for my needs. With that said, I used Nara to track my baby's first year of life and whole-heartedly recommend it to any other parents. I've been able to download my data and manipulate it as I'd like, and I don't feel like my content is being used for monetization of the community owner.
I use a hodgepodge of methods, none of them adding up to any real "system." I keep most emails, have a complex Dropbox system and a separate, and mostly not-redundant Google Drive system. I have piles of notes and notebooks, but I rarely go back to them. I horde papers in Zotero but can't seem to develop the meaningful habit of attaching my comments to them. I have multiple years' of spreadsheets tracking work habits and outcomes, projects, etc., plus all the academic records that are required artifacts of work at a university. I even have a file box with scraps of paper sorted by subject. But, the main things that help me to remember these days are: rocks from the places I visit (labeled with location & date), sketches of places I go amd food I eat, poetry notebooks, and my extensive (some might say excessive) photographs going all the way back to middle school and then college darkroom film and photos I developed myself. I'm going to try Capacities because I struggle with much of what you have described. (I've also heard good things about Scribner, but haven't really dedicated time to seeing if that will do the job.)
I use Evernote, and it works very very well for my brain. I've been using it for over a decade and it has SO much information: all book organization (what I've read, TBR list, who recommended what book, links to reviews, all manually cross-linked and tagged so I can find exactly what I need easily), what I've bought everyone for the past several Christmases, my permanent shopping list that is links to things I think would be helpful or pretty to buy for me/my house but which aren't requirements, records of recommendations from internet threads, interesting articles, pictures of boxes of things I've bought so I can toss the actual box but have the information contained on the box, etc.
My brain doesn't really work in a "web" way -- those brainstorm web things we had to do as kids never worked as well as neat bullet points for me -- but I'm excited that there's a "web" solution for you and for anyone else who would find it useful!
Iām grateful for this little peek into how your glorious brain works!
Like others here, Iāve been using Evernote for a decade, but lately Iāve started feeling that Iām pushing up against its limits. Maybe Iāll give Capacities a try!
I started in Evernote in 2009. But then I felt like it wasn't evolving and I wanted more so I tried Notion, Milanote, and then Zoho Notes before I came back to Evernote. My favorite was Milanote for the flexibility in how I set everything up. Just signed up for Capacities to try it out!
I've kept a zettelkasten in Obsidian for the past couple of years, and I love it. I write articles and give talks a few times a year, and it helps so much with that. My next project is turning the more polished notes into a "digital garden," that can be shared publicly. Not so much for "content creation," but because I think it's a better picture of my whole professional thing than my LinkedIn or whatever. The real game-changer of the zettelkasten method for me was rephrasing ideas in your own words instead of just collecting highlights and snippets endlessly. It makes them so much more usable.
The timing on your post is crazy. Last night, I made my first ever Reddit post (Iāve barely lurked over there, itās too scary for me for some reason) in r/Zettlekasten. I asked if anyone had used Scrintal yet because my index card Zettlekasten is just not working out for me and I want an app that has beautiful UX. I havenāt even heard of Capacities yet, but Iām so excited to check it out now! Itās funny how the universe just plops things in front of us sometimes, isnāt it? š
Maybe iām overly thinking my thoughts (or overly judging them), but I keep Notion for all of my silly little keeping track of things thoughts and Obsidian for my āthis is an important thought that I need to weave together with other thoughtsā thoughts. Iāll let you guess which one is busier š«
Arghhh! The item on my calendar for literally right now* is "Learn Notion and Port Everything Over." Meaning, take my Evernote, my Apple Notes that I never liked, my Google Tasks and briefly used Google Keep and maybe some Docs, a bunch of loose Stickies and Word docs in project folders, my Bookmarks (Firefox, Chrome, and legacy), my To-Doist, some Miro boards, maybe even my Zotero and--no, surely not--Scrivener, and get them all in one place. I know, it's the dream of the killer app, the singularity, the Apple Orb that will one day do everything. Each of those others was supposed to be that. But I really do need something to hold together what my brain cannot, and the way you describe Capacities--I guess I am now chasing yet another shiny orb. Thanks, sarcastically and for real.
*because one ADHD strategy is to block out every little task on my calendar, even though almost every one inevitably gets shifted to Friday so that Friday is just a cascade of blue by the time it arrives
Thoughts in my brain look like a 3D constellation, too. I apparently think associatively, rather than linearly.
I do use lined notebooks, though. In my good notebook I write the things that I accomplished that day, the good things I saw and experienced. I didnāt expect to ever look at them again; they help me on the day itself to weight the positive things more. But I have been looking things up too.
Better than top-down for me is turning the entire page into a visual space. I put circles or squares around elements to separate them. I can draw lines to connect them. And sometimes colors to sort ideas/connections or differentiate voices.
Computer: These folders help me immensely:
Books. I put screenshots of books/media that I run across or that others recommend.
Make Things. Screenshots/pics with elements of things Iād like to make.
What Is an Image? After Lynda Barry. Screenshots of all the things I see that make me think, or see the world differently. Words/images both. This folder gives me a new random desktop background every 30 minutes. I like the surprise.
When I set about making something, I tend to turn to the unsorted materials first. Which speaks, in my case, more for not sorting.
Meg, if you want to *see* systems, a chat thread would be a possibility to share pics.
I've been using Pinterest to organize my rabbit hole dives. It's clumsy, and I'm always aware how intensely its being scruntinzed by the relentless $$grinder but I also let that algorithm churn up things that enhance my initial interest. It's a constant opportunity to train myself to keep focus and pick out what works and not get distracted by extraneous bright lights.
Also, David Epstein wrote about his organization recently, with more ideas in the comments:
https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/dont-let-good-ideas-get-away
I'm so confused about even getting started with a system like this. You have to import everything in and tag it by hand? That seems utterly overwhelming.
I guess this would be a use case I'd love to see for AI. If I could dump everything into a system like this and have some MT/AI driven spiders crawl it, and ask me what it is, I might be able to start. But it just looks totally overwhelming.