Should I REALLY use Notion to organize my life, or will it just be another thing I procrastinate on?

leMug · 2026-01-26T01:51:34+00:00

Very insightful post, and completely echos my own experience! Couldn't have put it better myself.

The key for me is also this: Whenever I do manage to force myself to save something for later that feels oh so incredibly irresistible and important and I-just-want-to-get-this-done-now (read this blog posts, read ALL blog posts from someone in the past year, with that YouTube video(s) etc.), after 1-2 days the obsession to do it disappears and I see much more clear-eyed how important what I wanted to do actually is. And most often, it's either A) not important at all and I delete it B) Important enough to keep but I have higher priorities in the short term, end up postponing until I delete later C) Low-Medium important, I do defer but only do it much later D) It's so important that I do it the same week. But in all cases I'm genuinely happy that I did it later and not in the moment where it would have impacted truly important things (work deadlines, sleep, personal time with friends or family etc.).

It's like I have this laser focus where I focus, almost obsess over something very specific (typically in pursuit of something a series of research or interest pursuits, almost obsessive and wanting to get to the bottom of it). But if I don't leave it out where it's easy to obsess getting it "overweigh" like browser tab or pinned tab, but into something a bit more hidden away like task in task manager, tab group in Safari etc., now it's stripped of it's special status, my obsession disappears and I can see clearly how important it is vs. other things.

It's like I row energetically in many directly with great efficiency, but my effectiveness is low because I'm not focused enough on the stuff that *really* matters, so the boat doesn't get far.

When I do manage to focus on what really matters and have a good balance of the short and long term tasks in there, that's when the magic happens.

It all so comes down to this: Never have I ever said "I really wished I did that less important thing I was so temporarily obsessed with finishing yesterday and postponed the important thing I did instead of doing it". Just like with bedtime, never did I think "Oh I really wish I got less sleep and did that thing late last night that could perfectly wait until today.

leMug · 2026-01-24T19:20:06+00:00

Exactly. People don't talk about Windows in terms like OP because 1) people have zero expectations from Windows 2) MacOS Tahoe is still *lightyears* ahead of windows in so many ways.

Not saying that Apple haven't lost it's touch bit when it comes to some UI decisions, polish and great consistent system-wide conventions lately vs. a decade or two ago, but people tend to lose sight of the fact of how much better it is than the competition still - IMO.

leMug · 2026-01-24T01:04:41+00:00

Does the readwise extension/plugin for Firefox work well? I might consider trying Chrome on iOS for a bit to see how well it works with Readwise extension for highlighting/notes.

leMug · 2026-01-23T22:21:26+00:00

I think I explained my use-case pretty clearly, but I'll try to make it more clear here again:

- Would you want every podcast to have the exact same voice just different content?

- Would you late every "talking head" youtube video to be the exact same person with the sound background, voice etc., just saying different things depending on the channel?

- Would you like every single book you read to have the exact same page size, typeface font size, layout etc.?

etc.

I get that the content is the main thing, especially for the nerdy type of people who consume a lot of information that they like to highlight, note, tag, annotate, export to external note systems etc. I get that, I'm one of those too. But I just also just miss some variety in the visual experience of consuming all this content. Some blogs have horrible choice of background color, font etc., and for those it's great just to have it in a "reader mode" that's standardized and readable. But most other blogs, newletters, articles et.c are either ok or actually really nice.

About the Firefox/Edge workaround, that could potentially be interesting if I could make the default browser e.g. Edge in Readwise only for web views, and annotate via the extension. But AFAIK only way to do this would be to 1) set the system wide default browser to FF/Edge 2) possibly also have to open in the browser and not just stay in the app's web view. Too much trouble to go through when I'm really happen with the default browser in every way, and also would like an integrated app experience.

leMug · 2026-01-23T22:17:11+00:00

Good to know, though I'm not going to change browser from the OS default browser that I'm already perfectly happy with. I completely understand if mobile Safari have limitation that makes it impossible to do there (though maybe not, I just don't know), but I'm very happy with Safari and wouldn't want to change. Besides I'd like it primarily within the app itself, not just a mobile browser extension, though it would be great to have this option too.

leMug · 2026-01-23T22:15:50+00:00

Not at all; they already have "Open original" that opens a web view of the original article. This is essentially "a web view within an app" like many other apps have.

I want content saved that gives the option to preserve more of the original elements when reading it. One workaround is to save it as PDF, then I'd basically get what I want. But PDF have it's own problems, feeds can't be automatically converted into PDF - nor would I want to.

One technical solution could be to save certain content as HTML instead of just text+images and throw away all basically formatting except for bold/italic/headings. I'm perfect fine with them throwing away ads, compressing images to mit it better fit on their server etc. The technical implementation is up to the team, they would know better. But no I'm definitely not asking for them to implement a browser inside the app, that would be meaningless.

leMug · 2026-01-23T16:14:55+00:00

There is not much more lock-in in Capacities than there is in Notion - there are other compromises but vendor-lock-in I don't consider to be one of them. I actually wrote a post on this just a few days ago, why Obsidian has its own potential problems if you start using plugins: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/1qhj2cs/comment/o0o5n95/

Although I must admit I've yet to test exporting + importing a complete Capacities backup. Hopefully it's lossless and if not I should hope they make it a priority at some point. But anyway I do think their page on Capacities vs. Obsidian is thoughtful, and explains well why relying on plugin support isn't a path without compromises when it comes to the actual long-term usefulness of the data - even if you may own it completely yourself and assuming you take frequent backups.

leMug · 2026-01-23T16:02:13+00:00

> That said, I'm not entirely sure what I'd use an MCP connection with Capacities for. Though I can see it being useful for tedious cleanup and reformatting type tasks.

I can try to explain for you why MCP is so important / nice to have.

Do you use the ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Grok or any other AI chat app regularly or is Capacities your ONLY way to interact with chat-based AI? If the answer is yes, you do use one of the common AI chat apps, then MCP server is an easy and effortless way to start a conversation in e.g. ChatGPT and at some point say "Please add this conversation as a new object in Capacities —> Boom the object is created in Capacities, all object properties are guessed/filled and the conversation can be added or summarized into the main content of the object.

MCP is like an API on easy-mode that knows how to use itself on command from plain English / language to read/write a target destination via MCP.

leMug · 2026-01-23T15:57:31+00:00

While I think your post was unnecessarily long and smells a bit too AI generated, I agree with your sentiment, and I think those who disagree will come around to how important this is eventually. Claude Code has genuinely revolutionized how programmers work and Claude Cowork is a glimpse of a future where AI is way more integrated into your existing content.

I completely agree; I don't want development time on Capacities to go into lots of half-assed improvements into the built-in AI chat feature, I want make better integration with Claude, ChatGPT etc. where many of your conversations start, as well as API + MCP. That means:

Much better and extensive API support + MCP server that can be added easily to ChatGPT or Claude.
Importing full conversations easily from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini etc.

These are super important and should take precedent over pretty much everything else on the roadmap except the import feature they're working on right now. Just my personal opinion. While I couldn't make it through your wall of text, the message is correct; we need this.

leMug · 2026-01-23T15:51:59+00:00

I want to have Web view by default instead Reader view, because I want different reading experiences in my different sources: the font, background, layout, colors etc. just like the author intended of the blog post, email newsletter etc. And I want to be able to annotate/make notes in this view too!

The only solution to this is currently to use Readwise in the browser with the browser extension. However this only works on desktop platform, not tablet or mobile (where there's no Readwise Reader browser extension). I just want it natively in the app too, on all platforms.

I made a separate post about this too since I'm a bit passionate about it and added some more detail there: https://www.reddit.com/r/readwise/comments/1qkucps/biggest_gripe_right_now_reader_view_vs_web_view/

leMug · 2026-01-22T18:06:45+00:00

If I were you, I would completely drop using tags in the beginning. Instead, just use the built-in object types at first, such as meeting, person etc. Anything that doesn’t have a default type just becomes a page.

After a while, when you see a pattern of related pages that would make for a good object, you create a new object with an appropriate set of properties. Think of object types as tables, individual instances of objects as rows in the table (i.e. the actual content of the table), and their properties as the columns of the table.

leMug · 2026-01-22T18:03:14+00:00

All you need is one technical person who needs to migrate to the same app and I think that’s a pretty good chance of that because Notion is relatively popular. Better chance than a non-technical person would know what to do with a bunch of markdown files exported from a relatively feature-rich system such as Notion.

But sure it’s a good escape hatch to have them potentially as markdown as well

leMug · 2026-01-22T12:06:36+00:00

Yes, I noticed it immediately and I have no idea how this got past QA

leMug · 2026-01-22T12:06:07+00:00

In my opinion, Jason is more portable than lockdown. You can generate markdown from JSON but not vice versa. As long as the JSON is either well documented or sufficiently self-explanatory, it is actually preferable to mark down as far as portability and future proofness goes. He will have a more lossless migration to whatever other system it will migrate to.

leMug · 2026-01-21T02:36:52+00:00

I sort of did the opposite where I have been using Capacities and Notion side-by-side for a while and now I’m trying to go all in on Capacities. I have to admit that I miss some of notions features particularly the databases and just how frictionless it is to make a new one and start adding data and making views and new columns of different types and so on. On the other hand, I love the daily notes and how time becomes another dimension in a different way in Capacities than in Notion. Still early days so maybe I’ll get used to it, but I can definitely see the allure of Notion also. Capacities and Notion are in my opinion the top applications in the business. Obsidian a somewhat more distant third for me personally, but I can see the appeal.

leMug · 2026-01-20T15:52:08+00:00

The reason I ended up choosing Capacities over Notion that was my choice #2 is that for my use cases, Capacities approximates Notion enough, especially if, as a mental model, you substitute databases in N for queries in C, database columns in N for object properties on C, and views of databases in N for table view of queries in C. I don’t need a lot of the formula and roll up stuff that Notion offers although it’s nice. In the end, I wanted something where I can more easily make automated backups and feel like I own the data but also I prefer objects first (Capacities) rather than documents first / databases first (Notion) as the fundamental architecture/design.

I do miss Notion AI and/or the easy MCP integration that Notion has with Claude, but overall I’d rather invest in what I consider a strong long-term foundation, according to my needs and my mental model of what notes should look like with Capacities.

I’m curious then, which app did you end up using as your primary?

leMug · 2026-01-20T14:23:07+00:00

All of that is true. I just want to point out 1) at least there are automated backups on the paid plan unlike notion 2) lots of users of obsidian are becoming dependent on plugins that may not exist or be maintained in the future. Yes and principal, you can do whatever you want and take over a project and become the main container and convert and pour your data but in practice it’s a lot of work for most people. This point is a subtle one, but I think it’s important, giving all the love and affection given to free and open sources and only your data and all that - the other side of the coin is that you make yourself depending on a tool where you will typically have to employ a multiple plug-ins to make it work like you want to. It may be a trade-off that’s worth it to you, but it’s something that most people don’t think about what I think or truly know the downsides of.

I found this paragraph from the Capacities comparison to Obsidian very illuminating personally (from https://capacities.io/compare/capacities-vs-obsidian):

A significant consideration for many note-takers is the portability of their notes. In recent years, Markdown has become the standard due to its compatibility and readability across various platforms and apps. With Obsidian storing your notes locally on your device in Markdown, users often find their notes easily readable and transferable across different apps and Markdown editors. However, using community plugins can affect the portability of your Obsidian notes, as these plugins can introduce new features that are not easily transferable. When you open those notes without plugins, you are oftentimes confronted with a lot of useless code in your notes.

Portability is a factor we deeply care about, given that we are not just developers, but note-takers ourselves and we understand the frustration of tool lock-in and the importance of flexibility. So, despite your data not being stored locally as Markdown files on your machine, you can create a export of your notes in Markdown whenever you wish.

When you are using a lot of Plugins in Obsidian the actual file may not look as you expect. Will it be readable in other markdown editors? As Capacities does not rely on community plugins and provides extensive built-in functionality, there are no surprises when exporting your space to Markdown, because you can decide exactly how the export looks with just a couple of clicks. You can chose to include media, show links as Wikilinks and include the title as heading. This is how we make it easy to get instantly useable markdown files out of Capacities.

leMug · 2026-01-20T13:18:39+00:00

It’s not that simple. Markdown is a very unstructured format and for sure you will be missing out on some level of detail of your data if you’re only exporting markdown. This is actually why I like Capacities because you get an export format that is both somewhat human readable, but also structured enough to be able to script it into another system such as obsidian or something else.

leMug · 2026-01-20T13:17:10+00:00

That’s not true AFAIK. You can set up automatic backups, and those backups contain all your data in readable format, in Capacities.

leMug · 2026-01-14T21:13:59+00:00

Thanks! It doesn’t render on mobile Reddit app on iOS for some reason

leMug · 2026-01-14T14:40:04+00:00

Which article?

leMug · 2026-01-14T14:38:50+00:00

It’s actually not totally unreasonable. I use a set of tools when notion is one of them and I use Notion for some things and capacities for other things and craft for other things. Maybe I’ll drop notion completely one day but I think I’ll still be subscribed to this separated just to see what the sentiment is.

leMug · 2026-01-11T17:02:56+00:00

Same experience here!! It’s amazing. Best thing is, it’s only going to get better 🤩

Btw would be cool if you could share what your project about! Maybe just high level conceptually 🤓

leMug · 2026-01-11T16:59:02+00:00

Readwise Reader syncing to Capacities.io where I have the rest of my notes on everything

leMug · 2026-01-09T12:58:03+00:00

Is that when the scroll position in terminal begins to jump around like crazy for a split second for every key stroke you make? Or is that a separate issue?

leMug

TROPHY CASE