Managing Physical Notetaking in a Digital World With Capacities

My current method for converting physical notes to digital ones.

I was about to leave Capacities. I almost went as far as deleting the app off my phone.

Almost.

Until I realised one thing; due to the fact images are objects in Capacities and due to some novel Backlink view updates, it has the power to revolutionise the way I can combine my love for physical note-taking with the need for having a digital note-taking component.

Let's dive in.

Physical notebooks are where most of the mental magic happens

I’ve seen it time and time again online; you just can’t beat physical note-taking for its versatility, tact and all round usability. It disconnects us, slows us down and helps the brain get into flow mode.

We can write when the electricity is off, at the top of a mountain or in the comfort of our own living room snuggled up with a hot water bottle and blankie.

However, the overarching reason I like notebooks, is their dimensionality. I’m not stuck to lines and text. If I want to scribble something out in free form, it allows me to do that. They are a key part of Step 1 (Ideation) in my writing process.

I can write much more exciting to do lists inspired by the environment around me.

Until now, I’ve never been able to manage the physical to digital transition. All my thoughts and ideas remain in the notebook if I don’t type what I’ve written by hand.

I’m basically ignoring a massive part of my workflow.

Digital systems blow physical out the water when it comes to many aspects of the modern note-takers needs

We can all write about the ‘power of the manual Zettlekasten’ but the reality is, it’s a labour intensive system which doesn’t have many of the benefits of the digital age. It’s great if it works for you, but at this time it doesn’t for me.

(Although I’d be wrong in saying I’m not curious to create an index card Zettlekasten…)

Digital notes have some mega advantages over only physical ones, not least; what happens to my notes if my house burns down!?

Although I could write an entire website on the benefits of digital notes, basically it boils down to these five things:

1️⃣ Digital notes can exist in more than one place at once

2️⃣ They are searchable within their content

3️⃣ Digitised notes are (easily) editable

4️⃣ Online notes are shareable with others

5️⃣ Digital notes can have pictures, PDFs and websites easily integrated into their content; Pritt stick anyone?!

The first point is central to how we can organise our information. The second point is the most important for those of us who can’t remember where or when we wrote something. The last three may or not be as important.

Now we can even get AI to write our notes for us in our own individual writing styles.

However, physical notes have their own unique benefits we must not forget

Therein, we can also deduce the beauty of having physical notebooks.

Our physical notes tend to be more of our own thoughts, written in our own hand, and at our own speed.

They exist in their original form in one place only. Any editing has a clear path of destruction and clear evidence of how our thoughts have evolved over time. To expand this understanding and interpretation, we can doodle our own images and concepts as to how we see them.

Pens are cheap and notebooks are cheap. A lot of the time they can be free. I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to what pens I like, but that doesn’t make them expensive. Currently I’m using a free branded ‘Nutanix’ notebook and a Staedtler stick pen in blue and they work really well together (seen in main image above). Outlay; £0.

Our physical notes are private to us and able to be read by very few; our notes remain physically ours. On random pages in my notebook my daughter has drawn pictures or placed stickers, or her favourite thing, which seem to sprout from notebook like seeds, sticky tabs… When I come across these art pieces, they bring me joy.

A notebook is integrated more closely with my life and therefore my brain, than digital notes.

So I want to keep these notes as they exist in space, but I also want to use them in my digital note-taking. At the moment things stay in my notebooks unless I’m using the notes straight away. Yet there is good stuff past me stuff in there I want to keep track of.

So what options do I have?

Although fancy e-ink tablets or smart notebooks are great options, all we need is a phone and a few apps

I like options I can try that don’t require a vast outlay of resources or that will work with a system I have already invested in.

Obsidian currently holds 99% of my notes, but it’s never gelled with my notebooks. There are options in there for OCR and PDFs but they aren’t intuitive and I quickly get frustrated with the constant roundabout way in which I need to do simple things, like have an image gallery.

Here’s some other options I considered to convert physical notes into digital ones

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is an option if you have super nice hand-writing. These convert your handwriting into typed characters.

The Android app ‘Text Scanner’ did the best job of my handwriting out of the ones I tried. It gives you something not very readable, maybe vaguely searchable, but it’s messy and doesn’t work well if you deviate from the linear form. I’m sure there are better paid options out there and I may try these with time.

I’ve considered investing in a Rocket notebook or Moleskine Smart Writing System. These are supposed to be very good and I would love to try them out one day, but the ultimate product (digitised notes) is actually very similar to the method I use below.

(I would really like to try the Smart Planner for calendaring from Moleskine, but that’s for another day).

Then there’s e-ink tablets like the Remarkable 2 or BOOX series if you want to up the ante to digital-inspired note-taking systems. However, here we’re realistically looking at an investment of £350+.

I could also go all out and head towards the Ipad/ fully featured-tablet direction but the slidey screen and electronic glare mean these aren’t great for long, or even short, hand-writing sessions.

As we go down this list, they become more and more disconnected from why I like physically writing in a notebook in the first place.

So it came down to what I could make the simplest option; pretty much everyone has a phone and the app ‘Capacities’ is free on the basic plan.

The workflow from notebook to digital form needs to be as simple and painless as possible

Lets face it. The more steps we have to get from A to B, the less likely we are going to do it.

Here’s the MVP workflow as it stands at the moment:

✅ Each physical notebook is named; Alpha, Beta etc. — Easy names. Getting to Zulu is an exciting problem for future me.

✅ Each notebook page is numbered — some notebooks have this feature built in, otherwise I just add it in myself; something I do in some notebooks anyway, but not in others so this is not a huge habit change for me.

✅ Each note is dated — something I also do anyway.

✅ Each note has a title — again, I do this anyway but in future I’m going to write the title in capitals and underline or box it to make it super obvious.

✅ I scan the page with Microsoft lens — it’s an app I already use and have on my phone (there are plenty of others — I find Adobe PDF Scanner better for creating multi-page PDFs); using a black and white filter keeps everything looking consistent, removes shadows and matches different notebooks.

✅ Save jpg image as ‘Notebook page number’ — again, easy (and quick) naming I don’t need to think about; I will probably never need to find the page again, but if I do … There’s also the option to save as a PDF if you’d prefer. Images work better with this workflow.

✅ Upload file to Google Drive in a top level ‘NOTEBOOK IMAGES’ folder. You could use whatever synced storage you like.

✅ Upload file into Capacities, either using the app (Believer subscription only) or on a computer.

✅ Tag with ‘notebook’, write note date (YY-MM-DD) in description along with title, and add to any relevant notebook ‘Collections’ in Capacities.

✅ Add in any links to files in Capacities e.g. if I’m working on a blog post like this one!

And that’s it. It might look like a long list, but it’s fairly seamless in the scale of things, as most steps I do anyway. Finally, whenever I’ve finished with a notebook page, I score it diagonally.

Another option is to Whatsapp the image to Capacities, but there would be extra steps involved due to going via an inbox.

But why Capacities?

Two features make Capacities unique in managing physical to digital notetaking

The first feature of Capacities, which enhances the physical-digital transition, is due to images being objects. This means they can have their own tags, notes and can link to other pages. For example, I can link my scanned notes pages “Alpha 100” and “Alpha 104” to this blog file I’m writing.

And in comes the second feature, and that’s down to being able to view image collections and ‘Backlinks’ as a wall.

Viewing Collections of my scanned pages in ‘Wall’ mode means I can see the full notebook image at a scale I can read it without opening. If I need to have a closer look, it’s easy to click on and open it in a larger window. At the moment I have an ‘Alpha’ collection. It’s easy for me to sort by import date and page number. What I would like to be able to do in future, is add property fields so I can also enter the date I wrote the note, but for now the first part of the description will have to do.

The most beautiful part is you can view page Backlinks as a wall of glorious images; I have a full viewable spread of my relevant scanned notes right below where I am writing. In fact you can view Backlinks in multiple ways and apply filters to focus what you want to see as you write. This is a powerful feature released in the last update.

The future of my physical -> digital note taking

I’m excited for how this system will develop over time. Naturally, I have a lifetime’s worth of notebooks to transition to digital, but if I set up a good habit now, at least future me will have something from today going forwards, in both forms whichever direction things go.

The even bigger question is, after my blog post on Capacities a few weeks ago, in which I decided was not for me, am I going to back track and renew my Believer subscription for next month?

I think I might just do… because this system could be a game changer for me.