Captures, are they necessary? I was introduced to the concept of captures from the “second brain” paradigm- where you have captures, areas, and projects. The problem is, the captures bin almost always ends up becoming a hairy mess of anything and everything.

I am wondering how to make them useful but manageable. I do not want to be the baby sitter of whatever little things I have decided to pin. It adds extra work rather than reducing work. The goal of the whole system is to reduce workload, not increase it. The goal it to improve efficiency and reduce mental overhead. For this reason, they are failing as is.

On one hand, the issue is just their spectrum of possibilities. They can be movies I have liked ( or books ), they can be things I want to buy, they could just be random thoughts that really don’t have an action item. They can be really anything and that is the issue.

In a perfect world, these could be intelligently auto sorted into their respective area. The problem is many things do not even have an area yet. And maybe, for good reason. Let me give you an example.

When I first began using Notion, I created a bunch of pages to cover any faucet of my mind. I had a book list with tracking, movie list with ratings, present list for everyone I knew. It all became so much technical debt that it all became abandoned. More can be too much and so it is a balancing game.

I think the best way to achieve my solution of a captures page that is useful in terms of reducing mental overhead and increasing efficiency, is to have the capture page show on my project planning board and also auto archive things older than 3 months. I should also sort them by date added.

One thing I want to do is a purchase list- things I want to buy but cannot buy yet. This would be a great thing to build out. This also aligns with my holiday money allotment I have set up.