Object-based notes: a simple problem

Information technology has enriched our lives, or complicated them, and arguably both. The Internet in particular has vastly expanded what can be done from a desk or indeed the palm of your hand, but the translation of analogue to digital functions often falls some way behind the intuitive.

This may change, as tech companies have begun to talk of AI agents working with voice processing to make these interactions simpler, more human. I’m a little sceptical, and certainly wary of trusting even more of our lives to big tech, but we’ll see.

In the meantime, we have notes software. Lots of it, increasingly promising to help organise our chaotic minds and our workloads. For years there was Evernote, and OneNote, and a handful of lesser-known apps, but things really began to change with Notion, extending the ambition of what a notes app could do.

I played with it for a while, until I realised that I was spending more time trying to organise the software than I was on the things that actually needed organising in my life. It’s true that as a freelance individual I was not the target of an app that seemed mostly designed for corporate team working, but it claims to be useful for individuals, and I imagine there are plenty of individuals using it that way. It wasn’t for me.

Though it did start a quest to find something better, and I’ve been through most of the prime candidates, including Capacities, which has been getting a lot of attention recently. It’s been an interesting encounter, and there are many things I like about the software, but using it has given me a clearer view of something wrong with the whole endeavour.

Capacities wants you to leave behind any notion of an organised hierarchy in your notes. It wants you to think of each note as you create it as an object: perhaps a book review, or an idea, or a recipe, or simply a page. You can group objects of the same type in helpful collections, and you can add tags to link different object types. Linking objects to each other will also create a kind of knowledge graph in the background, rather like Obsidian.

It took me a couple of attempts to get my head around this. After all I was coming from a pretty well-organised hierarchy of notes, and initially I tried to use Capacities’ different…