How Many Capacities Spaces

Whatever you put in one Capacities Space is isolated from others. This makes deciding on the number of Spaces very important.

The key question you have to answer is: why are you using the app?

This is easier to answer after a while in the PKM space, as you will have probably tried and tested hundreds of mini-systems before you got to where you are now.

What made you curious about Capacities? Why did you download it? What problems do you want it to solve?

For me, I wanted a more visual way to organise my permanent or topic notes.

On 24th November, I saw that Capacities offered different page layouts on their believer plan, which was a direct answer to my problem about outliners forcing me to work down a page, I wanted to use the whole page. I had tried Capacities before but it hadn’t clicked, and page layouts weren’t yet an option.

On this same day, I got access to Tana, and was really underwhelmed. Amazing app for sure, but it was a fancier outliner without the things that made me love Logseq so much (PDF viewer). So I felt a bit stuck and weird for not loving Tana.

Then, two days later, the Capacities team tweeted this:

Suddenly I understood the power of Capacities because all of the Tana discourse had made me see the value in such a data structure. Plus it had a pretty graph, the page layouts and colour.

My obsession grew quickly and here we are.

I started with just one space: topics, which is essentially just my permanent notes.

The more I played with Capacities and understood how it works, I realised I could take it further than topics, because the built-in tag database is better than folders and file paths which I just hate. Information does not need to be categorised as one absolute file path, it can serve many purposes. Tagging is the way forward. So I began playing with other use cases.

For someone who follows an obscene amount of house inspiration accounts on instagram, the first use case I thought of with this tag database was home inspiration storage. I wrote about that here.

I decided to put this in a different space, because the main space I have is for concentration: I am synthesising information, exploring links and connections, and organising the information in a way that makes it easy for me to understand, remember and apply to my Masters.

Conversely, when I’m saving house inspiration, I am daydreaming, getting distracted, and wondering how I can apply the inspiration to my little 1 bed flat with a budget of £100.

These are two different mindsets, and I don’t want that daydreamer mindset shadowing my work because I am easily distracted. Therefore, they are two different spaces: “topics” and “home”. They’re not the best names, as the home space will soon have non-home things in, so I need to find another name. Perhaps “knowledge” and “everything else”, but that’s not that catchy.

Finally, I have a test space, for some YouTube videos I’d like to make 👀. The reason for separation is privacy.

The main takeaway here then is that separation is defined by use, which is something I’ve just picked up and learned to refine whilst on my PKM journey.

Long term information stored in Capacities is easier to resurface, link, tag and organise than anything stored in a file drive, so one of my 2023 goals is to move as much over to Capacities as I need, and as makes sense, whilst keeping as few spaces as possible.

Connection is what makes these apps so good and more spaces limit that — however if they’re well defined multiple spaces can be used sensibly and efficiently.

How many spaces do you use?