You were never meant to think in folders.
You already think in things: a book, the friend who recommended it, the author, the city, the film. Let your notes reflect the way you think.
Folders: one place per note
Folders introduce friction
You have to decide which folder to put which note in, and then later remember where you put it. Your brain is meant for having ideas, not storing organizational structures.
One home, for a thought that has several
A book recommended by a friend, written by an author, set in a city, and turned into a film has to pick one folder. The other connections stay in your head.
You have to remember the decision later
Projects or Archive. This topic or that client. The choice felt small when you filed it. Finding the note means remembering decisions you might have forgotten.
The maintenance gets heavier than the thinking
Nested folders look tidy on the first day. Then you maintain them. Many people end up searching anyway, which is a sign the folders were never how they think.
Files and folders were built for computers.
They made sense when a document had to live on a disk, but your thinking does not work that way, and your notes don't have to either.
Files and folders
One path. You have to remember it.
Object types and links
Open any one of them. The rest is there.
You already sort the world by what things are
A person is not a project, and a book is not a meeting. Once you type your notes by object, you can link the meeting to the attendees, to the projects that came from the meeting.
"When I realised everything was an object—and I could link anything to anything—it clicked."
One note can belong to many things
A folder asks you to decide where a note lives. Alice belongs with Lena, who recommended it, with Lewis Carroll, who wrote it, with Wonderland, and with the film. There is no one place that holds all of that. Open Lena and the book is on her note.
"The whole idea of everything being an object works for me."
A theme is a tag, not a folder
Marketing and personal development used to be folders, so every note had to pick one. A tag can sit on a meeting and a book. Open the tag and both are there.
Start with the note.
Think about what the type of note is, not where it should go. Capacities takes care of that for you.
Ask what this note is
A book, a person, a meeting, a place. If you can finish the sentence “this is a …”, that answer is the object type.
Create a note of that type
A meeting, a book, a person. You write the note as what it is.
Ask where you want to see it again
Link it to those notes. Open any of them later and this note is already there.
Questions
Let your notes remember for you
You already know what a note is, and where you want to see it again. Let Capacities take care of that for you, so you can get back to your real work.