Capacities Object-Based Notes — Reorganize Your Ideas with Cards
Capacities changes the basic unit of note-taking from the "file" to the "object": a meeting is a Meeting object, a book is a Book object, a person is a Person o
Capacities changes the basic unit of note-taking from the "file" to the "object": a meeting is a Meeting object, a book is a Book object, a person is a Person object, and every object carries its own properties and bidirectional links. This design means you no longer have to decide up front "which folder should this note go into"; instead, information is naturally categorized according to its real type and then grows—through links—into a knowledge web that can be queried again and again. For people who accumulate knowledge over the long term, this is the difference between "organize once, retrievable forever" and "having to search all over again every time." What Object-Based Notes Actually Change The core of traditional note-taking software is the "document," whereas the core of object-based notes is the "structured entity." In Evernote, Word, or most Markdown editors, every note is a blank page, and you rely on folders, tags, and file names to categorize it after the fact. Capacities flips this around: you first define a content type—for example, creating a Book object and giving it properties like "author," "rating," "reading status," and "topic"—and afterward every book automatically carries these fields. This is equivalent to putting a database's structuring power into your notes, yet without having to manually build a database. This brings a concrete consequence: the same piece of information only needs to be entered once, and then it can be found from multiple angles. A Person object automatically aggregates all the meetings, reading notes, and to-dos that mention this person; open it, and you see everything related to this person, without having to decide in advance "should this person be filed in the client folder or the project folder." Information's belonging is no longer an exclusive single-choice question, but a web of multiple links. Why "Cards" Are Closer to How the Brain Works Than "Folders" The intellectual origin of object-based notes is the slip b
FAQ
What Object-Based Notes Actually Change
The core of traditional note-taking software is the "document," whereas the core of object-based notes is the "structured entity." In Evernote, Word, or most Markdown editors, every note is a blank page, and you rely on folders, tags, and file names to categorize it after the fact. Capacities flips this around: you first define a content type—for example, creating a Book object and giving it properties like "author," "rating," "reading status," and "topic"—and afterward every book automatically
Why "Cards" Are Closer to How the Brain Works Than "Folders"
The intellectual origin of object-based notes is the slip box (Zettelkasten) method of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann used a handwritten card system to "accumulate over 90,000 index cards, producing roughly 70 books and 400 scholarly articles in his lifetime" (source: Wikipedia) . His key practice was not "categorize and store," but to let each card point to others through numbering, forming a network that could "converse"—when he encountered a problem, he would follow the links
The Core Mechanisms of Capacities
Object Types and Properties Capacities lets you customize any number of object types, each with its own property fields and default templates. In practice, a common configuration is: set "books, articles, podcasts" as input-type objects, set "ideas, quotes, questions" as atomized knowledge cards, and set "projects, people, meetings" as context-type objects. When you write a reading reflection, you link it to the corresponding Book object and related "idea" cards, so that reflection hangs on thre
Which Kind of Pain Point Does This Method Solve
What object-based notes truly address is the underestimated cost of "not being able to find information again." "Knowledge workers spend an average of about 19–20% of their work week searching for and gathering information" (source: McKinsey) , equivalent to nearly a full working day each week spent "finding things" rather than "using things." The same report also estimates that "better knowledge sharing and retrieval could raise knowledge workers' productivity by 20–25%" (source: McKinsey Globa
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