Getting Started with Capacities!

having a calm and distraction free place in which to make sense of your world is crucial in today's age of information overload you need to be able to capture what is important to you and have a

positive place to process it which doesn't take weeks to set up or hours a week to maintain capacities is the notetaking app that wants to be this place for you that is the studio for

your mind you'll never have to think about complex folder structures or organizational methods because they simply don't exist in capacities we don't work with files and folders we

work with objects and object types within this environment in which you can link anything together this means your notes end up exactly where you need them and when you need them without the same

organizational overhead but in order to make best use of this setup it's important to understand these Core Concepts so in this video I walk you through the foundational ideas behind

capacities and show you how you can use them while you're getting set up within the app so let's get started so as mentioned capacities

doesn't have files and folders we're not concerned about where files live we're concerned about objects or notes and object types or types of

notes all of your object types are listed in the left hand sidebar so what that means is what types of notes do you have in your space and how can you

easily access just that group the answer to that is always in this left sidebar so you can see the groups of notes that I have and these groups are again object

types and capacities so I have trips places quotes and as mentioned this is a place for you to quickly access just

that group of notes so if I click on places I see all of my notes about places or in capacities terms

all of my place objects this is one of my place objects so we have all object

types all objects of one type and then one object and this pattern is the same for any group of

notes so we've just looked at places so far but if I click on trips I see all of my trip objects and I can open just one

or if I click on my quotes object type I see all quotes and here is just one as well everything in capacities is an

object whether it's a note like this or images like this or tags like this every

single thing in capacities is an object and every single object has a type and again it's these types that are listed listed in this left hand

sidebar when it comes to creating new content you have to make a decision of what type you want it to be and that's how this system is maintained we'll get

on to more in-depth creating and working with content in the next section of the video but just to show you now if I click on this new content button you

make one decision and that is what type do you want so you're creating a note for a reason what type of note is it you will of course have your own list of

object types so you would choose the most relevant one from there or if you're not sure precisely which one you want we always have this page type which

is just a classic note so this one decision means that you don't have any loose notes there's no organization to keep up with everything is neatly

organized for you because the second you create a new object it will show up where you expect it to just as I did there and then click on

the label it's another way to get to all of my definitions you can see that it's automatically showing up where I want it which is amongst the rest of my

definitions but you might be thinking right now well what's the point of working like this and why not files and folders like we're used to it's definitely true that there is there is no kind of organizational overhead with

this because you have to make that one decision what type is it the rest is taken care of for you but let's just have a look a bit more at these notes

this definition whil there is nothing written down yet this looks very different to my trip object for example

it's this is a bigger page it has some properties here that I can fill in help me plan the trip versus the definition which has a completely different layout

the same goes for the projects here the properties are on the side it's got a different color label but again my quote object type looks

different and this starts to show why working with types is useful if you identify different groups of notes within your space you're probably also

going to notice patterns within them for example for every book you read you will want to know who wrote it you might want to know when you finished it and what

the rating was so when you've identified that you want to know these things for every instance of that object type so for every book you can create properties for this properties are what you see

here it's a place for you to write that very specific information down and the way that we do this in capacities is we apply these settings to the whole object type so so that when you create a new

book so new content book you get the same properties to fill out and if I was to delete a property let's say I want to do rating

in a different way that goes from all of your objects too the reverse is also true any property you add to your book

object type is applied to all of them it keeps your notes uniform and in line with how you are actually working gives you a place to capture the information that you know you want for this type of

note you don't end up with different versions of notes flying around some with templates some without how do you know that you're finding everything that you need it keeps it simple you will

find all of your object types here and all of the notes of those respective types by clicking on them and you know that the structure of these notes is going to be uniform as well and this

takes away a lot of the thinking work with maintaining a note taking system it means you don't really have to think about it it means you just get to take the notes on what you need to do so just

again you see how I want my book object type to look but this is very different to if I create a new quote which is much smaller

or if I create a new project which has some different properties and a different layout so you can identify your groups identify precisely how you

want to work with that group set it up once which I'll show you in a minute and then you've got your structure in which to take notes in the way that works for

you in a way that doesn't mean you spend hours a week organizing your notes but still in a way that's flexible easy to update and can give you confidence that

your notes are working properly for you so that's how the core organizational structure of capacities works we have object types objects within them and

then you've got one object here but how do we actually get started with this because obviously I've got loads already I've applied my settings I know what I need from my notes how can you get

started I've created a brand new space so we can go through this together so we've just spoken a lot about object types so let's create some if you click

on this button you will see a screen and we have some built-in object types so they're things that capacities takes care of we have some templates that you

can choose from or you can choose to create your own we'll just use templates today but there is a video that shows you how to set up your own if you would

like so my advice would be when you're setting this up is to click on this button and have a look at this gallery and then open your current notetaking

system and have a look and see if you can identify any of these group groups or indeed any others in your notes if

you find them just click and then click use template and that will be added you also get um an example object so you can see what it looks

like we've also got some articles about how you might use a certain object type as well which you might find helpful and you can add as many that makes sense to you especially if you know you

already have notes of that type because that will help you transition into using capacities that bit easier okay so the final one I will add is

meeting now just for some general information it doesn't really matter if you add too many or too few at the beginning it's going to evolve if you

add too many hover over the object type you know no longer need and you want to find those three dots those three dots are very helpful in capacities have a look for them anywhere and you'll

probably find the action that you're looking for you can just click delete object type and it will give you a warning it's saying do you want to delete the whole object type and all of

obviously the notes within it and if you do you can click delete and it goes away and if you want to add more you can just open with a new template again or create

your own so just some information there so we now have just by using the templates a basic structure in which I can take some notes

about my work but also about the books that I read and the quotes that I get from it my advice when you're getting started if you're using templates isn't to change anything around yet in the

settings which again you find in the three dots which has things like editing properties and some other options as well we're not going to get into that today because there's already a lot for

you to get started with and these are definitely preferences that will evolve over time but now we have some objects I'm going to start taking some notes so

it already comes with a demo object of each type so project number one meeting number one person number one so to get started you can just edit one

of those so I'm going to create a person note about someone I might work with called Julie and once I've given it a

title that's important for the next bit and where it says text this is where you write it's your notes so I can write something down I can press enter and

this is just where I can take my notes there are lots of different I'm just going to close that so we see more clearly there are lots of different formatting options with capacities not

as many as like a word processor because it's not a word processor but you've got some options for how your text looks this palette gives you some color

options if you want to either color the actual text or the background like a highlight you can do uh links outside of

capacities you can add code if that's something that you need or maths got some options there my advice to you rather than me going through each

of the options here is to do what I've done and edit one of the example objects that comes with your new object type and just play around with the different

buttons that you get so highlighting the text will give you this menu play around with the options there but you can also click on these six dots next to each

block think of capacities notes as kind of like Lego blocks this is block of text this is another block of text and

to that I could apply bullet points or add a nice icon or turn it into a quote or many other things just have a play around and see which of your preferences

elsewhere work for you in capacities as well but the core idea here is this is your person object this person object is named Julie and I have some notes just

about Julie you'll also see that there are some properties as well so if you have her

email just make one up you could put that in there you could say she's from the work category of people you might have friends in here as

well and we can just create this category called work and that creates a work tag for which we can apply elsewhere as well you can also add

images to these people notes as well well so I found a image of a woman from unsplash so I can click on that and it gets a nice rounded appearance for this

person object and now I have my first note now let's say I go into a meeting with Julie and I want to take some notes I can click new content and

meeting and make this bigger and you can see that the properties on this side are different now because I'm not using a

person object I'm using a meeting object so I can fill this in so I went with Julie it is a work

meeting and it happened I don't need to rrange it happened today

at 9 a.m. and here I can start taking my meeting notes the text here functions just as it did with the jie

page so I'm going to do enter and then add some bullet points so I can do this or the shortcuts as well you'll find all of the shortcuts

in here so if there's something that you want to do quickly have a search for it and you'll find the shortcut that you need my favorite is just using Dash and

space so just some very basic notes there so so far we have looked at two different object types person I'm meeting and we've taken some very basic

notes within that and we filled out the respective properties of each type I can actually show you the side by side if you click on anything in capacities whil

it's holding down shift it will open next to each other but what is missing here is a way to say that it is this

Julie that was involved in this meeting and this brings us to the second very important part of capacities if the first is object types the second is

linking we can say very easily in capacities that it's this Julie who is in this meeting and as you saw earlier when I highlighted the text there were some

buttons at the end that I didn't press if I hover over this app it says link to existing object with this text selection so if I click on that it's going to

search all of the objects that I have and of course it's found Julie if I click on that that creates a link to the Julie page

and crucially creates a back link so let me show you what that means if I click on this now I get to

open the Julie page but this is more helpful when I'm able to look at Julie's page and say okay what are all of the things that she is involved in and that

kind of process is facilitated by the backlink I see that she has been part of this meeting and it works the other way so I can get back to that meeting from

that Julie page as well this is linking every time you create a link in capacities you get to go to somewhere to another note but it always tells you where you came from and that's a very

grounding way of working that means that you get to follow the trails of your own work very intuitively and very easily because all of this is done for you

so I've written two things down here she lives in London what I could do at this point is start collecting things about London and if I wanted to do that I'd

ask myself is there an object type that would already do that well the answer here is no but if I click on new type

and click place and use that template and then go back to my Julie page I can highlight London I don't have

any objects about London at this point so if we just go to the left of that button we used before you see it says

create an object from that selection and as mentioned before anytime you create a new object the one decision you have to

make is what type is it I want it to be place so I click that and I now can see I have a place called London and inly

that I know someone who is from there you can also see that this object type has a very different setup to the others and over time with this

approach you get two things you get object types that really work for the notes that you're making and you have connections that totally make sense for you because you simply make them

whenever you want whenever they make sense so there are two core pieces of capacities and the third that I want to tell you about today

is the central calendar you can see in this top corner where we create new content and of course search for our existing content there's also a button

for your calendar and if I click on that that takes me to this very useful screen we're just going to focus on this so I'm going to click this button to hide the

sidebar now this calendar is meant to be a very grounding and easy place for you to work in capacities if you need it has

a few different sections so you can see the month view and you can scroll forwards and backwards three time as you need if you don't need that you can hide

that sidebar we have a daily note which is a place for you to write things down during the day you can think of it like an inbox or a scratch pad or anything else it's just a place for you to write

which is related to today so let's say that I wanted to remind Julie of something later I could just quickly write that down instead of having to navigate to her page first and write it

down I can write that down and come back to it later I can make this even better too and do what we did before and highlight her name and click

at because shift click again that means the next time I look at my Julie note I'm reminded yes that I had a meeting with her but crucially that I also need

to remind her to check some documents it's a great way of keeping on top of things that you need you can also do that as your typing so remind at Julie

to check and you can see how this can feel intuitive as you're going along as well as the daily note if today's date is referenced in any other note is collected for you in this section so if

you have several meetings they can be collected here automatically this even has a time stamp and it will be in order if you add times to everything else and any objects that you create today will

be here as well so you can scroll back through all of your notes and see when you created something and it's a fantastically contextualized picture of

what you doing on a given day now the final thing I want to show you I'll open that Julie page I want to show you the graph view capacities is what's called a

network note taking app where when you make all these connections between your notes or capacities between your objects you are creating a network of connections and that graph view is the

visual representation of that you can see that I have the Julie note linked to the meeting they're both linked to work and to today and Julie is linked to

London this kind of linking and Association is very much in line with how our brains work and the categorization that comes with different object types is also in line with how

our brains work and of of course time is that useful anchor that guides us all and over time our users find that the combination of all of these things makes

working capacities feel very intuitive because there's lots of ways back to your information so I could find my way back to Julie from my London

place from the meeting from my work tag and from the date and so on there's lots of ways back to your content which means you're not worrying about where something lives or you're thinking about

where is it useful it's useful to link Julie to the meeting so I can see all of the meetings she's part of it's useful to link her to the London place so that next time I'm in London I can reach out

it's useful to link her to the work tag because then I see everything about work under that one tag and again it just starts to feel very natural so to sum up

capacities works with objects and object types and this creates a really reliable structure for you on top of which you can think work and connect you can use

the linking functionalities to connect any relevant content together and you've always got that essential calendar as well to ReDiscover and to work with your content from this time based context

instead you'll never have to think about where your notes live only where they are useful to you and it is this which creates an environment that works for you and grows with you and what will

allow capacities to become the studio for your mind