Hello everyone, hope you’re all well!

Slightly different format to normal… just playing around with it 🙂 

Table of Contents

• Posting 📤️

• Consuming 💌

• Doing 🏃‍♀️

• Thinking 🤔

Posting 📤️ 

Introducing my Mum to PKM - one of the most wholesome experiences of my life turned into one of my favourite posts! My Mum loves Twos and helping her find what works has been fun to witness. Some tips in there for introducing people to new apps and systems too 🙂 

5 Apps I’ve been enjoying recently - this is a surprisingly really popular post! But there’s a great selection in there if I do say so myself. Still loving Sofa. Forgot to mention MyMind which I am also loving.

Capacities Object Type Tour Video and Post - an updated look at my main Capacities space.

Consuming 💌

Jillian Hess!! How have I never heard of her work? Been loving diving into her notes on other peoples’ notes. Everyone does PKM and it’s delightful to see this in so many forms.

Armin’s work here is genius. Really inspirational for people interested in history and politics. Maps are not considered enough in note-taking!

I saw a tweet that mention Kairos and Chronos and for a journalling-life-writing-memoir enthusiast, it sent my head spinning in a wonderfully inspiring way. I read a lot of posts, this one was my favourite:

Also loved this:

I think this is PKM in the wild, and I particularly liked this quote:

I very much like the authentic parts of the internet, and I’d very much like to be part of it.

Doing 🏃‍♀️ 

Capacities is officially becoming my LifeOS. I will make specific content on this in the coming weeks, but I thought I’d show you what my daily note looks like in its early stages.

So this is in a separate space to my note-taking because I deal with the information within each space totally differently.

My LifeOS centres around the daily note, which I have a template for:

Starting at the top:

1. My word of the year is flourish- I need to remember to flourish, so I embed the word every day!

2. Vision board (with some images blurred, sorry!) to remind me what I’m working towards every day. It’s a vibe.

3. Q2 goals- tbh I didn’t set any explicit ones. I’ve been through some huge life changes in 2024 and I want to settle into them before I start setting huge goals. I’ve got the rest of my life for that.

4. Monthly goals - can you tell we’ve just moved?

5. Weekly goals - I pick from the monthly ones to take actionable steps each week

6. Daily habits - these are in flux right now, hence why they are not ticked!

These are embedded in my daily note template. Most of these are block references from their respective objects (quarter, month, weeks) I update the template weekly to change the week that’s embedded. It takes about 3 seconds!

Then I have a range of things I like to track daily, so I created an object type called ‘today’ and added the properties you can see under the ‘reference’ section in the screenshot.

Here’s what it looks like ‘under the hood’

This is working nicely, and I am loving having my lifeOS in a networked note-taking app.

It’s taken me a long time to break the habits of having databases, filters and templates like I had in Notion. But this feels much more ~me~ in this phase of life, and it’s in Capacities, so of course I like it!

I will be developing this further, and I will be sure to share as it’s very different to my main note-taking space :)

Thinking 🤔 

When did numbers become more important than what we’re actually doing?

Inspired by a conversation with Réka, I was thinking about this in terms of my goal to read 52 books in 2024, after I read 30 something last year, after (voluntarily) reading about 10 in the whole 5 years previous. I tracked all this in a rather excellent Media database in Notion. It actually worked perfectly for my Notion set up.

So given I moved on from Notion a couple of months ago, I was initially sad I couldn’t bulk import said database into Capacities. But now, a bit later on, I’m glad I didn’t have that option.

I have over 700 database entries in my Media database but I never opened the pages. All I wanted to do is say what I watched on a given day, yet I was keeping my TBR list in there too. It grew and grew as there is so much to read and learn, but that made it overwhelming to scroll through.

Capacities is a sacred place for me and that means I very carefully decide what comes into it. I’m working on a post about this right now talking about what I call my ‘Resonance Filter’. Books I haven’t read can’t really resonate with me (yet), so they don’t belong in Capacities.

So I have been using Sofa to track these things. It does a better, less manual job than Notion or Capacities would do here, and it keeps things separate as I want.

This has lead me to realise that I’ve had it wrong all this time! It’s not the numbers of books read. It’s what I actually want to ~do~. So…

What do I actually want to know?

What was I reading on a given day.

Why do I want to know that?

1. it’s essence, future me wants to know what past me was enjoying

2. because I want to sustain a daily habit of reading.

3. I want to sustain this daily habit because there’s so much out there to read.

So I must just get on with it. Now, that looks like reading, and then using a simple text property in my ‘today’ object just to write that down. I can make it into an object later if I want.

This same thinking applies to how we talk about PKM.

PKM conversations are typically framed through through a) the apps you use and b) the number of apps you use.

But what about what we are we doing in them? How does our PKM system help us? How does it make us feel? Are we having fun? That’s so much more meaningful.

So, don’t get caught up with the numbers if you can avoid it. There’s much to discover without the numbers.

If at the end of the year, you want to know how many books you’ve read, just count them! I personally forgot I didn’t need a Notion formula to count for me, but I’m glad I’ve finally remembered now.

Would love to know what PKM thoughts you’ve got going on in your lives at the moment, if you’re able to share!

That’s all from me this week folks. See you soon!

Beth