My name is Beth and I love thinking about systems, connection and agency.

My entry to this world was through note-taking apps.

Really, note-taking and the systems around it help me navigate my existence. This is a meta-post. It lays out how everything fits together. Click the links to dive deeper into specific parts.

Last updated June 2025.

I create and maintain systems for personal agency in frankly, a scary world.

I aim to develop my own world view and to never stop working on my critical thinking skills. Having your own beliefs and principles is vital in such a polarised age. I need a workflows, tools and practices to help me do this.

The inputs to my systems are artefacts from the real world and my interactions with it: media, conversations and observations. The one filter it has to pass is: does this resonate with me? I have a Resonance Filter for this.

I process everything in my note-taking app of choice, Capacities.

Processing to me is any combination of the following actions

• adding a comment

• adding a tag

• reviewing a tag to synthesise what I know about it

• linking to related notes

• reviewing backlinks in a note to synthesise what I know about it

• linking to a date as a reminder of when to action something.

Processing is about taking things that interest or challenge me, and turning them into real learnings amongst the context of everything else I have already captured. That's where reusing tags and linking to notes is really helpful. It’s bringing that context together for me. Read more about this here. 👇

That used to be the end of the journey, but I’m much more intentional about wanting to be changed by what I learn, not because I think I'm terrible, but because learning is a way of life, and applying your learning is hailed as the best method.

So I derive actions from what I learn from the world. I write down the things I want to act into my paper planner, or the next best location (e.g. meeting notes). This is my hybrid productivity system.

Hybrid means combining the best of digital and paper for your own goals and your own brain. To keep this system moving forward, rather than stalling action, is to keep digital and physical in conversation with each other. This means the things I want to act on go from digital to paper, but equally a review and reflection on those actions must make its way back to digital.

I journal every day, I review every week and every month and I create meta-narratives of all notes created in a week to give some conversation around the artefacts I've collected.

From these reviews I decide on further actions: what books do I read next, how do I spend my Sunday afternoon research time, which tag do I synthesise, what personal/professional goals do I want to focus on next week?

Then I act. I don't view tasks as solely for paid work. Tasks are how we navigate existence. Tasks are units of action. They're the arbiters of agency. "You can just do things", yes you can: tasks.

All systems must move towards action, or facilitate reflection from action. This is how I move forward, carrying the lessons from my experience with me.