How I Use Capacities as My Daily Driver (Instead of Obsidian)

For years, I was an Obsidian evangelist. I built a complex digital garden, a second brain that held everything. But honestly, I hit a wall. The daily friction of managing files, tags, and a labyrinth of plugins started to feel like more work than the thinking itself. I was spending more time on system maintenance than on knowledge creation. That\'s when I decided to look for something different, and my journey led me to Capacities.

Why I started looking for an obsidian alternative

My main issue with Obsidian wasn\'t its power; it was its unstructured nature. While the freedom of plain text files and folders is liberating at first, it became a source of cognitive load for me. I constantly second-guessed my folder structure, my tagging system, and whether a note should be a standalone file or part of a longer one. Daily notes felt disconnected from the projects and people they were about unless I meticulously linked them, which was another manual step I often skipped on busy days.

The core friction points for me were:

• Plugin Overload: I had dozens of community plugins. Keeping them updated and ensuring they worked together after a major update became a chore.
• The Blank Page Problem: Starting a new note often felt intimidating. What template should I use? Where should this file live? It was a small but constant hurdle.
• Weakly-Typed Data: A \'person\' in Obsidian is just a note with a #person tag. A \'meeting\' is another note. There\'s no inherent structure telling the system that these are different *types* of information, which limits how you can view and query them later.

The lightbulb moment: discovering capacities

When I first tried Capacities, it felt like a breath of fresh air. The concept of \'objects\' instead of \'files\' immediately clicked with my brain. Instead of creating a generic note for a person, I create a \'Person\' object. A book becomes a \'Book\' object. Each object type has its own template and properties, bringing inherent structure to my knowledge base from the moment of creation. It\'s less of a digital garden and more of a personal, interconnected database of my life and work.

My daily workflow in capacities: a step-by-step breakdown

Switching tools is one thing, but building a sustainable daily habit is another. Here’s how I’ve integrated Capacities into my everyday routine, replacing my old Obsidian workflow entirely.

Morning brain dump and daily notes

Every morning, I open my Daily Note in Capacities. This is my central hub for the day. I jot down fleeting thoughts, to-do items, and any ideas that pop into my head. The magic here is that I can create and link objects directly from this note. If I write \"Meeting with [Sarah] about the [Q3 Project]\", I can instantly turn \'Sarah\' into a Person object and \'Q3 Project\' into a Project object. The meeting notes are now automatically linked to both, without me ever leaving my daily view.

Connecting ideas with objects

This is where Capacities truly shines for me. Let\'s say I read an interesting article. I create a \'Source\' object for it. I can write my summary and key takeaways within that object. Then, I can link specific ideas from that article to the \'Q3 Project\' object. Now, when I open the project page, I see a list of all linked meetings, people, and resources. Everything is contextually connected automatically. In Obsidian, I would have had to manually create and manage these backlinks on each separate file.

From fleeting thoughts to structured knowledge

Throughout the day, I capture everything in my Daily Note. At the end of the day or week, I review these notes. A fleeting idea might be turned into a \'Tweet\' object. A quick note about a restaurant becomes a \'Place\' object. This process turns the unstructured chaos of a daily brain dump into a structured, queryable, and genuinely useful personal knowledge base. It’s a subtle but profound shift from managing files to curating knowledge.

What I miss (and don\'t miss) about obsidian

I\'d be lying if I said the transition was without compromise. I do miss the sheer power of Obsidian\'s community plugins and its complete offline, plain-text control. However, I don\'t miss the anxiety of choosing the \'right\' structure or the time I spent tinkering. Capacities offers a more opinionated, structured approach that, for me, has dramatically reduced friction and increased the time I spend actually thinking and connecting ideas. It’s a trade-off I’ve been happy to make for my daily productivity.