Organizational structures ​

Capacities is a very flexible tool in terms of content organization but here are a few built-in structures you might want to use.

Object types ​

If you click on an object type in the left hand sidebar, you will see all objects of that type automatically. You don't need to think about maintaining it, these objects are grouped for you.

To make browsing through them easier, you can choose to see all your objects, or to filter them or to sort them into a particular order. You can also choose to see the results in different ways: a list view, a table view or a visual view like gallery or wall.

This is the most general view of all your objects of this type. But we can create smaller groups of these object types with collections.

Collections ​

A collection can be seen as a subgroup of objects of one type. In other words you can have collections of people, or of places, or of meetings, but you can't have a collection of meetings and people. We can use tags for that use-case which we'll talk about in the next section.

A collection can be useful to create a curated set of objects of the same type. This can help you get to a specific group of objects quicker, and you can embed collections into different pages.

To embed a collection, go to the place where you want to embed it and inside of an empty text block simply type @ followed by the exact name of the collection. When embedded, they get a new set of sorts and filters which is only applied locally. This way you can create dashboards of different collections with individual sorts and filters applied.

But they are way more powerful than that, because you can add objects to multiple collections. This takes away arguably the major friction that comes with folders. Collections aren't a place for your objects to live, they're a place for your objects to be grouped. It's not unusual for groups to crossover, and collections give you the easiest way to deal with this.

Here is a video all about collections:

But as mentioned, collections and objects types only look at objects of one type. But we can categorize objects in different ways, perhaps by topic (e.g. "PKM" or "Science") or by status "to do", "done", or by rating. This is what tags are for.

Tags ​

A tag is object type with

• a title,
• a color,
• an optional description,
• and an optional icon.

Tags are used to categorize objects. Any object can be tagged, its type does not matter.

If you visit the tag page, all tagged content will be displayed using one of the data views:

• wall view,
• gallery view,
• table view,
• or list view.

In addition, sorts and filters can be applied. Tags can also be fully embedded in other objects (such as pages). When embedded, they get a new set of sorts and filters which is only applied locally. This way you can create dashboards of different tags with individual sorts and filters applied.

The tag page also shows the most relevant related tags based on common connections with the content. This allows you to quickly navigate to related topics.

These cover the core organizational units of Capacities: object types for top-level organization that you don't need to think about, collections for groups of one object type, and tags to bring together objects of different types to categorize them in different and flexible ways.

You may want to see all objects not in a collection, or all objects not tagged so that you can maintain whichever organizational structure works best for you. This is where the object dashboards come in.

Object Dashboards ​

When you click on an object type in the left sidebar, you will see that just under the title there is a button. You can use this button to look at all of your content, your object dashboard, or a specific section of the object dashboard.

If you click on "Dashboard" you can then click "Customize" on the right hand side, and choose which sections you'd like to see for the specific object type in question.

Because these dashboards exist for every object type, you can customize the approach depending on the type of information. For example, it might be more important to you to tag Concepts or Definitions, than it is to tag People. Therefore "not tagged" sections in Concepts and Definitions could be useful to you. Likewise having your collections at the top of the Person dashboard might be helpful too.

You can also pin queries to your dashboards to make sections for them too- such as in progress projects. This means the dashboard updates automatically too (because the query it displays updates automatically).