Why I Use Capacities
May 28, 2023
I've bounced through a lot of different PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) tools since I was in college - I was one of the first people to sign up for Evernote, then again with Notion, then again with Obsidian. I usually bounce off of them for some reason or another, and of the ones I mentioned, Obsidian is the best of the bunch by a long-shot.
That said, I started using Capacities recently and I've come to love it, to the point that I'm paying for its Believer plan. And because this is my blog and I get to do whatever I want, I'm gonna tell you why!
Capacities is very similar to Obsidian. It has the same focus on bidirectional linking, a Daily Page for each day of the week, and the ability to view stuff through a web-like "knowledge graph." It also works out of markdown.
CleanShot 2023-05-24 at 11.24.22
The big thing that has made Capacities click for me is how it organizes things based on "Objects." An Object in Capacities is basically a unit that eliminates the abstract nature of a page. So in the example above, there's an Idea Object, a Book Object, a Person Object, etc.
You can create as many Object types as you want, and then assign properties to them. So I, for example, have a "Game" object. In it, I have properties for the game's status, the rating i'd give it, tags for where I'm playing it, and the day it released (which appears in Capacities' built-in calendar). Then I have whatever information I want to think about for that game - in the example below you can see my unhinged notes on beating Stranger of Paradise's endgame DLC.
CleanShot 2023-05-24 at 11.29.58
So far I've got Objects I've created for Work Projects, Meetings, Assignments, Blog Posts, Games, Movies, TV Shows, Books, Peoples, Quotes I've collected, and Ideas I have, all with their own set of parameters that I can work in.
What makes Objects so cool for me and my weird brain is that they're way easier for me to remember. I have a hard time actually maintaining a PKM most of the time because I'll add something to it and move on. With Capacities, it's so easy to pull up or bidirectionally link things together because linking is tied to Objects. So if I have a cool idea for a song I might want to make, I can use '+Idea' to create a new Idea object and jot it down. All of your Objects are on the left-hand sidebar, and if you add a date inside of an Object, it shows up in the app's built-in Calendar too. And if I want to add a quote I found to one of my final projects in Grad School, I can use '@assignment/' to search for and link them together instantly.
CleanShot 2023-05-24 at 11.39.06
Capacities generates some Objects for you as well. It can embed entire PDFs, tweets (lol), remembers all your weblinks, audio files, and images too! And it has a Telegram bot, which is great because it lets me quickly jot down thoughts or send images into it which then generate on today's daily page.
I write all of my blog posts in Capacities, use it to keep track of media (and more importantly, my notes on media), work stuff, and even the tabletop campaign I'm running. It meshes very well with what is, again, my very silly-coded prefrontal cortex. I really like it and how frequently it's updated.
If this sort of thing is useful to you, check it out!