Five habits for a sustainable personal system
Capture, clarify, organise, act, and reflect. Learn the habits, apply them in Capacities, and keep what you capture from becoming clutter.
From capturing to having done
You pull things into Capacities for a reason.
But getting from capturing, to doing, to having done involves five key habits: capture, clarify, organise, act, and reflect. They are very much inspired by Getting Things Done, applied to Capacities.
Learn what they are and how to apply them, and what you capture becomes a basis for thinking and for action, instead of clutter in your space.
These habits are not a production line. You won’t do every one of them every day. They are habits you return to, in different ways and at different tempos. A project is not a book note, and it’s okay to treat them differently.
What unifies everything in your space is these habits.
Keep capturing, keep clarifying, keep organising. When it’s time to act, you know what you are acting on and how it connects to everything else.
The five habits
Not a pipeline. Five habits you return to, each in its own time.
Habit 1 · Capture
Get it out of your head.
Capture is the most basic habit, and the one everything else rests on. You are simply getting things out of your head into external storage.
You do not need to care about formatting, or even how it is going to be useful. The only impulse to develop is getting it out of your head and putting it somewhere else.
Use the daily note as your inbox. Ideas, tasks, notes to yourself, random things: put it all in there and process it later. Desktop, mobile, widgets, shortcuts, WhatsApp, Telegram, or email. Everything lands in today’s daily note, so you know exactly where to go.
Ask yourself
Is it out of my head?
Today
Daily note- box of tissues
- idea: habits video?
- call Sam re agenda
Habit 2 · Clarify
Confirm what you meant.
Capturing happens in the heat of the moment. It is quick, full of typos, and you might not say exactly what you mean. Clarifying is where you confirm it.
Ask what you captured. Is it a task? A project idea? Points for a meeting agenda? “Box of tissues” really means: buy a box of tissues, and put it on the shopping list. For an idea, write an extra sentence or two about what it meant to you when you captured it.
Keep the loop between capture and clarify short. Leave it a week, and you may have no idea what that note meant. And clarifying works anywhere: if a book note or definition is not clear to you, take a couple of minutes and rewrite it.
Ask yourself
Is what I am looking at clear to me?
box of tissues
Buy a box of tissues
Task · Shopping list
Habit 3 · Organise
Give it many paths back.
Capacities doesn’t do files and folders, so you never rely on remembering a file path. When you create an object, most of the organising is already done for you. Everything on the page is searchable. The calendar shows when you created it. And the object type already says what it is: a project, a book, a meeting.
The one decision left is where you want to see it again. Linking gives you multiple paths back to the same thing. Find a book note through its topic tags, through its author, or through the ideas it sparked.
Don’t worry about too many links. Add the ones that come to you. If a note later shows up where you don’t need it, just remove the link.
Ask yourself
Where do I want to see this again?
Tag
Psychology
Author
James Clear
Tag
Productivity
Idea
Systems over goals
Book
Atomic Habits
Habit 4 · Act
Open Capacities and do something.
This is where you actually do the work. Complete the next task towards a project. Turn an idea into something you post online. Or just sit with a question, a research question or a personal one.
Things in your space move at different tempos. Projects and tasks have a short life cycle: open, done, rarely revisited. Research has a long one: you tag highlights from an article to a topic and may not think about that topic again for a year.
Different tempos, same habits. You still capture, clarify, and organise, just on different time frames. That is why Capacities has object types: a project is not treated like a book note. When it is time to act, you know what you are acting on, what to do next, and how it connects to everything else.
Ask yourself
What do I need to do next?
Tasks & projects
Short life cycle
Research & ideas
Long life cycle
Different tempos · same habits
Habit 5 · Reflect
Notes are a conversation across time.
The most optional habit, and also an incredibly powerful one. You choose to look back at something and see how it feels to you now.
Keep it light: back from a trip, ask what went well and what you would change next time, and send it to your daily note with a tag. Or go deeper with a weekly review: How are you feeling? What did you learn? What will you change?
You create something on a certain day. Life moves on, you move on, and when you come back to it, you think again. Has your position changed since you first captured it?
Ask yourself
Has anything changed?
From March
Trip to Lisbon
Captured · linked · still here
Look backA sustainable personal system
Capture, clarify, organise, act, and reflect. Find out how the habits work in your own practice.