Building My Personal Information Superhighway
Exploring popular networked-note-taking systems.
The Teardown
Thursday :: October 31st, 2024 :: Approx. 6 min read
👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we interact with technology that powers our day-to-day lives.
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Unlearning Established Habits
I’m 42. 🎉
I spend much of this glorious age acting like a normal 42-year-old. I’m approaching my career’s second better half. I’m navigating my prime earning years. My body is stiffening way too fast. I’m sometimes groaning when I stand after glorious stretches on the couch. Doing most things earlier or in quieter settings takes precedence over 10 pm New York City dinner and hyped boozy celebrations. Bed before 9 pm is not uncommon.
And, I’m doing some things like usual. Organized files and folders live all over Macbook disk, including a folder labeled “Sort” that sees heavy use. I save things down. My life isn’t cloud-native in totality.
I’ve discussed jotting notes in lots of places. Some live in Apple Notes, some in Notion, some as drafts or actual exchanged emails, and others on paper.
Notes are just bits of information. Text or images stored for later reference. But most of my notes don’t link to others in any deliberate way. Consulting for a client means I store notes about that client in a named folder. My budget lives inside a lovely folder named Financial. I’m so creative!
I also can't see the content of each note in relation to any other note. And I don’t have a temporal link between them either.
Some software products try to reduce the strain by showing information bits in a central dashboard. Sales people use HubSpot to see every note, email, call, and customer data point relevant to their work. The dashboard for Company X shows everything linked to that company. And the dashboard for the CEO of Company X is specific to that individual, with links to other company activity in HubSpot.
What about relationships between data points? What about the unknown relationships? Two notes or bits of activity from the same day might seem unrelated at first glance but later end up attached at the hip. You want to discover that relationship sooner, if you can, right?
How?
Software Munches On Information Gathering
I’m now using a tool called Capacities. It is one of a handful of tools in the networked note space. The most well-known is another tool I reference here and there: Obsidian.
Capacities and Obsidian model information gathering on the workings of your brain. You use webs of neurons to ingest, hold, triage, and recall information. In keeping with the theme, these tools apply a web-like framework (a graph) to your every day information.
A day of information activities might include these items:
A note about how you want to spend your day, possibly inclusive of a to-do list.
A note or clip about something you read from a book, magazine, article, etc.
Summary points from a conversation with someone.
Research data about company.
Capacities centralizes your prose about how you spend your days. Here’s an example:
The interface looks simple enough at first glance and includes a few little treasures:
The Daily Note button (blue): You click that button (or label) to see all your daily notes.
Tags (e.g. teardown, writing, product): Press one to see content from any object type that references that tag.
Calendar: See a familiar monthly grid of your activity.
Graph View: Uncover relationships across your content.
Most of what I highlighted in those bullets describes relationships. A daily note is one of a series of notes over time about you. Tags highlight relationships between content that you define upfront. I tag all my thoughts about The Teardown newsletter with the “teardown” tag. One click shows me every thought about The Teardown since the beginning of my archive.
The graph view is the real unlock. It is the interconnected view of your thinking. It is the many networks and relationships across bits of content. Software neurons link information entities together without much work. You used to spend lots of time organizing them. Not anymore.
This simple screen-shot displays a bug within Capacities graph:
I think it should show me October 30 2024 (when I’m writing) - not yesterday. But, I’ll cast that aside. Capacities is evolving fast.
The small web of visual links shows the three tags relevant to this newsletter. But I also want to know what else exists related in any way to the date or those tags. So, I expand the graph:
The expanded view shows me a much richer web. A post draft called Tiny Decisions, Major Victories: Just Say Yes displays relationships with several tags other than those I mentioned before. And I see topics spanning dates and vice versa.
Further graph expansion shows me more relationships. I tagged a couple of my drafts with “behavioral psychology,” a theory that I cover here. I also tagged a couple of other bits with a couple of software-product concepts: ux, discovery:
So, is this graph helpful to me? Yes, so far. I'll write a note, post, or document some other object and then dig into the graph.
Could it be helpful to you? It depends on your motivation.
Value In → Value Out
Information tools rely information, duh. There’s a saying in my professional world: garbage in, garbage out. Here’s another way to use that concept here: information in, discovery out. The process of discovering something requires basic work. You talk, you take notes, you read, or watch or listen (video, audio). And you gather information - explicitly or in-memory - as you navigate that work.
Capacities depends on that information. No information, no graph. The graph’s value to you scales with amount and the quality of information to the app.
There’s one more interesting bit embedded in Capacities: objects.
Objects in this context correspond to things you record and link to the graph. So, you might input a Person object, or a Book object, or a Meeting object. Various properties and settings control an object and its graph relationships.
I created a "space" (Capacities term), started with some of the standard objects (e.g. People) and then added my own: Posts.
Posts are objects that represent drafts of The Teardown. The post object isn’t special - mostly just text - but it differentiates what I write for The Teardown vs. other writing.
Groundbreaking? No. Neat? Yes. Organized? Yes. And networked.
So, I’m putting real effort into using Capacities. The goal is to push as much of my note-taking and information gathering into the tool and see what I end up with at the end of the year.