Why we Designed Task Management Like This

A driving tenet of our design philosophy at Capacities is that the app should just work. The out-of-the-box experience should be simple, elegant, and intuitive. We’ve been striving towards this from the beginning, and our approach to task management in Capacities reflects this goal. We’d like to explain a little bit about how and why we’ve designed task management like this, especially because it might differ from existing approaches you could be familiar with.

Intentional task management design

Capacities is a note-taking app designed for you to house your knowledge, find and make connections, and do your best thinking. Tasks can aid your workflow, but they are not the same as a piece of content or an object containing knowledge you want to keep and reference long-term. Tasks have short life spans. They are the smallest unit of action you can take to move towards something you are working on. Your notes in Capacities have a long lifespan, and are designed to be connected and worked on over time.

In this vein, tasks are not complex projects to be kept open for a long time, or notes that should be connected to many other ones, like with your knowledge work. They should be simple actions.

In our view, tasks should not need multiple levels of organization or complex workflows. You shouldn’t have to be doing admin to stay on top of your tasks. You should ideally not be storing tasks in Capacities that never get checked off. We hope to solve this problem for you through contextualized task management (more on this below). By contextualizing your tasks in Capacities, you are able to limit overwhelm by only seeing tasks relevant to you at any given time. You can view all your open tasks and decide how to best start ticking things off, or you can zoom in on one project and focus on working through the tasks related to it.

We want you to be actively actioning tasks and working on the things that matter most to you. Tasks should be actionable items that you can easily process and work through. Our setup reflects this approach. We want you to be able to:

• Easily capture tasks
• Decide when to do them
• See them when and where they are relevant
• Tick them off once you’ve completed them
• Forget about them once you no longer need them

Introducing contextualized task management

Tasks in Capacities are designed to be a simple system for getting things done out of the box. We wanted to make sure that it is extremely easy to create a task from anywhere in the app, with minimal friction and decision-making involved. The only questions to ask yourself are:

• Where do you want to create the task/ where should it live?
• How important is it? Set a priority.
• When do you intend to do it? Pick a date you want to action the task, and it’ll show up on that day’s daily note.

Importantly, you don’t have to answer any of these questions. You can just input tasks and keep working, and know that your tasks will show up in your task dashboard, where you can process them later.

Based on the information you include, Capacities automatically computes all the required data views for you. Tasks appear where you need to see them, and when you need to see them, without you having to do anything.

Every task has a context to which it belongs, for example, the project it is related to (e.g., ‘buy candles’ is a task related to the ‘host dinner party for friends’ project), or the object you created it in. You can also add context to tasks when creating them in the context field. Now even if you have many projects in your life, you choose to focus on one project at any time and just see the tasks related to this project.

You can also select a task status, and view your tasks in a kanban board to get an idea of all your tasks and where you’re at with working on them.

Our intuitive task dashboard gives you different views and dimensions you can use to process your tasks.

A lightweight solution to help you do your best work

At Capacities, our goal is to let you think and work without friction. By keeping task management simple, contextual, and intentionally lightweight, we make sure tasks support your thinking rather than complicate it. You always know where to put something, when to act on it, and where it will show up when you need it. No extra setup and no elaborate systems required.

Ultimately, tasks in Capacities are designed to help you stay focused on what really matters: doing meaningful and capturing lasting knowledge to help you live an intentional life.