What's next?

Published: June 1, 2023. Revised: July 31, 2023

Choosing a “knowledge and idea management system” is a decision that is not made overnight. It involves a lot of consideration and trade-offs to be made. Switching is possible but comes with a cost.

Because of that, we at Capacities think being as transparent as possible is indispensable. We are sharing our takes and ideas in our community, but we wanted to share a consolidated paper on what we plan to focus on in the next months and where we see Capacities in the long term.

This might be a long read, but it might also help you decide if Capacities is already or might become the right tool for you.

Our focus for the next months

We have many exciting ideas on our roadmap, but we want to guide the next month based on the following three pillars. They are simplified, and there will be projects we are working on that don’t perfectly fit these categories.

Performance and Ease of Use

The last thing we, as users, want is a shiny new tool that, after working with it for a while, surfaces a lot of fundamental flaws, issues, bugs, or friction in our workflows. In the whole journey of Capacities, we focused on creating a polished and well-working app, and we are more than happy with this. Nevertheless, we want to double down on this and will heavily focus on making the experience as smooth as possible. This includes:

• Better loading times: We want to make the app snappier and generally faster. We want to reduce the number of situations where your brain is faster than your app.
• Shortcuts and workflows: We will revisit the workflows and patterns we all use to make them more powerful and simpler.
• Bulk operations: Moving content, adding tags to multiple objects, creating a new page from a selection, transforming content, and much more. We want to make these actions accessible via simple menus and a command-based dropdown.

Working with Capacities

We think it’s super important to polish the core of Capacities: organizing, processing, and working with information and knowledge. We will put a high weight on making these workflows as frictionless as possible. This includes:

• Smart queries and search: We envision a “thinking environment” where more and more organization is done automatically, where content can be accessed based on your current needs. We’ll soon introduce queries that should allow you to build views that aggregate content based on simple rules. Queries will also allow you to aggregate content based on search terms and topics. Browsing your knowledge network will become more natural and simpler.

• Media and smart media: PDFs, podcasts, videos, and images are an integral part of our intellectual and professional journeys. We want to make it as simple as possible to generate value from these mediums, extract information, make them searchable, and much more.

Connecting Capacities to other apps

There is and will never be one app that will allow you to do everything. We have calendars, task managers, reader apps, and more. With Capacities, we want to build first-class integrations that map and interlink different approaches as best as possible. This includes:

• Bulk import from other Apps: Many have used other note-taking apps before. We will build custom imports for the most common note-taking apps so you don’t have to move everything manually.
• Capacities API: An API is the basis for connecting apps. We plan to release more and more functions as an API so developers can build integrations with other apps.
• First-class integrations: Based on votes and discussions in our community, we want to develop well-working and well-thought-through integrations. These integrations will be fully integrated into the app so they become part of your workflows without friction. Examples are calendars, browser extensions, or reader apps.

A few words on highly requested features

We see a lot of interest in two features: Task management and whiteboards. Here’s our current opinion:

• Integrated task management: There are two camps on task management. Some want it to be integrated into their PKMS, and others want it to be in a separate app. We think there is a way of doing both: By letting you decide which option you prefer. This allows you to send tasks to your favorite task-management app or by having a lightweight task-management system integrated into Capacities.
• Whiteboards and visual knowledge work: There’s a lot of value in brainstorming ideas and relationships on a visual canvas. We have many great ideas in this direction but they also require a lot of development time and work. We’ll continue to draft ideas and are happy to discuss ideas in the community, but we think that there are many features and improvements that are much more important at the moment. Nevertheless, we will of course not exclude whiteboards from our roadmap.

Capacities’ values and Capacities as a company

We already achieved a lot. We’re so grateful for our users and the enthusiasm, excitement, and constructive feedback from our users and the community. We both would have never expected so many positive vibes for our work. Thank you all for being part of this journey.

We envision Capacities as the best “thinking environment” for individuals. We want to enable people to spend more time in a calm place where we can capture, process, think, work, and create amazing things. We want to remove any friction and be a tool that is as useful as possible for you. We want to achieve this goal before we do anything else.

After many discussions, we are convinced that a relentless focus on users and individuals is best guaranteed by staying an independent and sustainable company. With the support of all Believers, this is possible at the moment, and we are incredibly grateful for this.

We want to expand our team, accomplish milestones faster, and build a better product. We, therefore, focus on moving Capacities out of beta as soon as possible and then launch Capacities Pro. This will hopefully allow us to build a sustainable Company with a great culture.

Thank you all for making this possible. We’re so excited for what will come.