Building a Network of People

In this article, we’ll explore some of these ideas. We’ll talk about linking objects and object types together, to build out a useful network of information that supports your life.

Here’s what’s coming

• People
• Organizations
• Locations & Countries
• Meetings & Projects
• Recommendations

Let’s get started. This article follows the video created on the same topic, which you can check out here. 👇

Creating the person object type

We can start simple here and use the person template. Click new type then choose “Person” from the gallery. This already comes with a few properties:

• Contact (e.g. email address)
• Category tag (think personal, professional, family)
• Cover image

But we can add more properties too (if they’re beneficial to you)

• Date last seen (Date time)
• Date last reached out (Date time)
• Job title (Text property)

This gives you a great way of tracking your contacts, be it professional, family or friends. But we can make this a bit more useful by connecting people to objects of other types, such as locations or organizations. Let’s explore organizations first.

Linking people to organizations

Just like with people, there’s a template for organizations. Add this, then open your person object type settings (click the three dots > object type settings)

Add a new multi-select property called “Works for”. We will choose a link type of organizations (that’s why we had to create the object type first).

The result of this is each person object has a property that has a drop down menu of the different organizations you have in Capacities. If someone works for an organization you don’t have an object for yet, you can create it right in that property.

This is an easy way to track information that’s probably already in your head and it gives you two directions to find this information: you can either look for people that work at an organization by opening that organization, or you can check where someone works specifically by opening their person object.

The more information you can add about a person, the more useful this connection becomes. For example, if you have someone’s email, add that to their object and you have all that information right where you need it. This is great for networking, and this is a great way of thinking about what Capacities does too: networking connects people, industries and companies together, and we’re working with a similar idea in Capacities by linking notes about those things together.

We’ve just linked people to organizations, and now we’ll link people to locations.

Linking people to locations

There isn’t a “Locations” template at this time, but we can create one in just a few steps. Click new type, name it “Location” and then click create. Now go back to the person object type settings (just like we did with organizations) add a new multi-select property called “Location”, change the link type to locations, and now you can link people to the places they live or work. Here’s what it should look like in the settings. 👇

And here is what a person object looks like with all these properties filled in. 👇

This has the same benefits as with organizations, except now you can open a location and see who you know from there. This is great for when you’re planning trips (professional or personal), because you have the details of who you could reach out to as you plan the trip.

Building on these ideas

So far, we’ve created a useful network of people and locations thanks to a couple of new properties and object types. But we could add some more object types too. You might not need everything, so just choose what is relevant to you from the sections below.

Meetings and project object types

Let’s start with adding meetings and project object types from the template gallery (+ new type button). This allows you to easily track and take notes on what you’re working on with the people in your Capacities space.

The meeting object type already has a text property in which you can note who attended. We could replace this with a multi-select as we have in other properties above, but using a text property has its advantages too. This is because the text properties work just like text does within your notes: you can use simple, plain text or you can link to other objects (@ or [[]] to link existing content or + or / to create and link new content).

This gives us essentially the same functions as the multi-select but it is a bit more flexible. You might not need a note on every person who attends a meeting. If you do then change this text property to a multi-select property as that will ensure this happens. If you don’t need an object for everyone, keep this text property.

Regardless of which method you choose, the outcome will be the same: you will get a lot of contextual information around your work and the people you work with simply through linking. Here’s the outcome of linking to a person object. I see what project I’m working with Anna on, a task for me to ask Anna something, and I can see the meeting notes of a recent meeting we had about that project. This was achieved by linking mentions of Anna’s name, and filling in the relevant properties in the project and meeting object types. Next time I meet Anna, I have all the information we need.

Assigning countries with AI

Next we will add a simple countries object type. This is the first step to setting up AI autofill in our location objects, so that countries can be assigned at the click of a button. Grouping locations by their countries can be useful for trip planning, be it for personal or professional reasons.

To start, we’ll create a simple object type called countries. It doesn’t need any extra properties, but it’s nice to add an icon so you can use the country’s flag. Once set up, we will add a couple of countries in order for this next step to work. You can do this one by one, or follow the tip here.

Once there are some country objects, we’re ready for the next step. Open the object settings of your location object type and add a new single select property called “Country”, and update the link type to countries. Turn on the AI autofill toggle (if you have AI enabled).

Let’s test it. Open a location object and click the AI button in that property. If the relevant country exists as a country object, it should be linked automatically.

Now you can see all the locations that mean something in your world in a given country, which might be really helpful when planning trips or even considering places to move. There’s no need to hold this information in your head; Capacities can keep track of it all for you!

Recommendations

Finally, we’ll move onto recommendations. People recommend books, films, hotels, restaurants and more all the time and we can capture this in Capacities too. A great start is the book object type template which already has the text property called ‘Recommended by’. This works just like the meeting object property above- you can @ or [[ to link to existing people, use + or / to create a new one, or just write plain text. If you link to a person, you’ll see what they’ve recommended to you when you open their object.

But we don’t just need to hold book recommendations. Let’s create an object type called “Places” and use tags to categorize these different places: hotels, restaurants, museums etc.

We will add an object type called places, and add a select property called ‘category’. We want this to choose from a list of tags, which is the default link type when setting up a select property, so there is no further action needed there. But we will click ‘fixed set’ which means you only see tags related to this purpose going forward rather than all the tags you have. It’s a way of creating a specific drop down menu for the property you’re using here. Next, add a Recommended by property - either a multi-select or a text property, pick which feels the best to you. Now the Places object type is ready to add content to.

Start by adding a hotel or restaurant you like and tag it with the correct category. Next fill in the location and who recommended it to you. If you visit that location, you’ll see what you should do/visit next, and who recommended it to you. Likewise, next time you see a friend, you can see if they have recommended something to you that you’ve read or visited, and it’s a great reminder to talk about it!

As this object grows, you might want to organize these places into their subgroups. If you are on Capacities Basic plan, you can use collections and manually assign your places to them. You can see all your collections in your object dashboard.

If you are on the Capacities Pro or Believer plans, you can use queries to do this automatically. Follow this structure to create queries that look for places with specific tags and then create a list of those places for you. 👇

Queries are great because you don’t need to think about organization, they will take care of it for you. Save these queries to your dashboard, and they will be nested within your left sidebar, which gives you easy access to this information. This is great for planning days out or bigger trips.

Once you’ve been to these places, you could even add a rating tag, a visited tag, and you can create queries for them too. Now you know what to recommend to people!

How this helps you

Once these object types are set up (or indeed the subsection that are relative to you), you have a great supporting structure for dealing with information about people, places, your work and recommendations. You have the flexibility to connect whatever is relevant to you, and the features within Capacities to resurface what you need when you need it. We can see all these connections in an object’s graph view. Imagine how these connections can organically grow over time as you meet new people, work on new projects and visit new places.

If you want to set this up with video support, check out this video.