A weekend in the life of my personal systems

I’ve always liked the idea of buying myself rings to celebrate my personal achievements. I bought one when I went freelance for PKM Beth, and I wanted to buy myself one when I became a full time employee at Capacities, but we had just bought a house that month and on moving day, we walked into wet carpets thanks to a burst pipe. Let’s just say I had other financial priorities at that time! I guess the sensible time never returned and I forgot about my jewellery journey. Then I was served an ad for Daniella Draper and suddenly the memory came right back. There was no personal achievement to celebrate, but I decided I must have the ring anyway. Turns out I just like rings.

This post is about my trip to Leeds to buy said ring, but it’s also about personal infrastructure, which I consider to be the connected tools and routines that support your life. This is a real look at mine. I want to show what it actually means to have personal infrastructure. This reads a bit like my diary, but if personal infrastructure supports your whole life, I guess that makes sense!

I love scrolling. I scroll, I save, and each Sunday I review my saves. During one scroll, I saw the lovely Daniella Draper ad and didn’t even wait til Sunday, I saved the image to Capacities immediately. You can see I thought about it so much it was the image of the week.

I’ve never bought expensive jewellery before, and this would be made to order so I wanted to try it on in person before committing. Our closest store is Leeds, so we booked a weekend trip. The weekend arrived and I was too ill to go (this happens a lot...), so I just moved on with life, knowing that I’d get to Leeds one day.

Fast forward just a couple of weeks, I was scrolling again and I saw this tweet about elephant armour. It intrigued me, so I saved it to Raindrop. Sunday arrived, so I went through that week's bookmarks and came back to the tweet. I confirmed that the caption was true, and decided I’d quite like to see that, and I’d quite like to buy that ring stack. It was time to re-plan the trip.

I created a Trip object type in my personal space and then created a Leeds trip object. As you can see it was not a deeply planned trip! I was a woman on a simple mission.

You can see that I linked to an object called Leeds in the Location property. I used the backlinks and unlinked mentions to see if I’d taken any notes in the past few years about Leeds which should influence my trip. Turns out not this time, but for big cities like London and Paris, I have a fabulous list of historically-adjacent things to visit, or places that have popped up in my reading.

I’ve become very interested in travelling more now I’m a bit better, so I went down a rabbit hole and found some travel apps. I wasn’t super happy with any of them, so vibe coded my own actually, but I needed something I could take on the go. Mine was only on my desktop. I tried committing to Tripsy. I like the map visualisation and how you can orient yourself to your hotel. I pinned the places we wanted to go and had that on my phone ready for my trip.

The day of the trip arrived. On the train, I started writing this post and I updated Thursday’s day object. I also addressed the tasks I had scheduled for Friday but obviously wouldn’t get to. The ‘excuse’ option comes in handy here. All of this was done in Capacities and none of it required Wifi!

Then I got my Kindle out and continued reading A Stranger in Corfu, which is the latest in my list of interesting spy novels.

I read exclusively on my Kindle because highlighting is a way of life for me. I make highlights for various reasons: to remind myself to google something, to capture a plot point, to think more deeply on a specific excerpt, to capture something that made me think of my life. Anything I want to engage with further for whatever reason. Whilst I wasn’t connected to Wifi at this time, I knew that as soon I was, something behind the scenes would talk to Kindle which would talk to Readwise which would talk to Capacities, and that I’d have a Source object waiting for me with all my highlights.

We soon arrived in Leeds.

We walked straight to our hotel to drop the bags off, and then we went out for lunch and cheers-ed to the first weekend break I’ve been well enough to go on for a while! 🍻

I don’t drink but I love the taste of a Mojito, so I order a non-alcoholic version wherever I see one. I naturally tended to this habit anyway (I love a default decision), but I remembered that I read a book which made me decide to elevate this to a thing™ that I do.

When writing this post I could not remember which book that was but I was determined to find it. I knew it was from a book, meaning I could look at my fiction book query to find all the possibilities. I decided to do that later because I needed to get ready for the elephant armour visit! But as I closed my laptop I witnessed my brain going down different paths in order to try to find it in my mind. Something you’ll hear me say a lot in Capacities videos is that linking gives you multiple paths back to something. I had one path back to this lost quote: it would be somewhere in a source object. The second path emerged when I remembered that I have a tag called “how I want to travel”. I opened that tag, and there it was! In another spy book of course.

I need a place to write my Mojitos reviews, so I’ll show you my Mojito Tracker.

When I took my screenshot for this post, I saw that I started it on the date night that celebrated my personal infrastructure post being published. I’d psyched myself out of posting for months, and it felt big to finally celebrate. I had forgotten that detail (too focused on that mojito taste!) but my meta review remembered for me and served me a timely reminder, all because I made a simple link. This is the magic of networked notes. 💫

But anyway, back to Leeds.

We walked around the city, the places we went being captured in Time Atlas, which is one of my fave apps ever. I don’t think I’ve shared it before but if you are into life logging, you might enjoy. I also checked that my location tracking was working to unfog the world on another favourite app, Fog of World.

I love having the visual representations of where I’ve been with literally no effort required from me. Both Time Atlas and Fog of World do this. I was very ill in the second half of 2025, after being generally unwell through most of my 20s thanks to chronic illness. It’s been a personal battle to gain confidence again getting out in the world, and I must credit these two apps for encouraging me to be brave and try. I didn’t think gamification worked for me - wrong. It works just great. This is one of my favourite insights: think it won’t work for you but try it anyway. I just keep learning that lesson, and I have a note for it, so I can link every time it comes up in my life in my reflections!

Then it was time to find the ring shop. I walked in, and the assistant asked if we were just looking or if we wanted some help. I opened Capacities, found the picture and said please help me find this! She zoomed in on the pic, and amazingly they had the exact one I wanted in store! 25 mins later I was the proud owner of the ring I wanted which Joe actually bought for me as an anniversary gift. Thank you Joe! 💍

We carried on with our day and eventually came back to the hotel room. We watched Rivals episode 6 (if you know you know), and then read on our Kindles, more highlights waiting to sync behind the scenes. Every day I fill in a day object. The ring was the the pic of the day naturally.

In the morning, I finished my book, then opened my laptop to my Source note to write down my thoughts on the book. I write down my thoughts first before checking out other reviews online. I thought it was a really interesting concept but a tough read at times, and I wondered if that is why it’s average was lower that I’d expect.

I typically review my highlights in a different session to writing down my initial thoughts. I want all my highlights in Capacities to be processed because I highlighted for a reason! To ensure I don’t forget to process any, I have a simple checkbox property in my Source type called ‘Processed’. I have a query called ‘Unprocessed’ and I have a weekly task (on Sunday of course!) to review my Unprocessed query. It’s a very simple system, but it’s maintainable and in line with my reading goals.

With that book finished and a train ride ahead, I needed to find my next read. I checked my ever growing Kindle library and realised the Kindle app is terrible for discoverability. It’s something I need to solve in my personal infrastructure, so I captured that thought to my daily note through my Raycast integration which I have mapped to Cmd D on my laptop.

I knew I would resurface that thought no later than Sunday, which is when I do my weekly review.

Then it was time to put the laptop and Kindle away, and go find this elephant armour that made me book the trip! It was horrible weather, so one Uber later (whilst tracking if I’d reach level 101 on Fog of World - I did not), we arrived. We had a drink and a breakfast sandwich and talked about our learnings from the trip. I text my Capacities daily note our thoughts, knowing I’d pick them up in my weekly review too.

It was a big museum, we wandered around and found the model elephant. It was strikingly large and very impressive. We spent some time looking at it, and I was pleased I’d seen it with my own eyes. Thank you to that Tweet for showing me!

Then our trip was over, and I got the train to my parents’ city for a visit before heading up north again. As we pulled away from Leeds train station, I hit level 101 on Fog of World. A great end to a great trip!

My Dad then picked me up, and he told me that him and Mum had ignored my advice to stay far away from the new Jack Ryan film and they decided to watch it anyway. They understood why I gave that advice after! This is an illustration of one of my favourite quotes: you cannot learn from my mistakes, only from your own, which I have a note for so I can link to it whenever it appears in my life in my reflections. I use this a lot.

Our conversation also reminded me of something I’d seen in a review about the Jack Ryan film and I knew I’d linked the review to my Top Gun Maverick note. I couldn’t remember the name of the source, but I knew I’d find it in Top Gun Maverick’s source note. I opened it, found the quote and we talked about it. I like to timestamp such interactions with ‘/now’. I’ll be able to discover it later, just as I discovered our previous memorable interactions when I opened Dad’s note to get this screenshot. It’s really nice!

After, I made us lunch and I took my rings off and put them on top of the microwave before washing the dishes. I paused after I did this, because I remembered another note I have in Capacities: Rings on the Microwave. This is what I call a trace: things that follow you through life, or that you notice which provide a crutch for reflection.

My mum always puts her rings on the microwave. She had the same stack for a long time, and then it was sadly joined by an Ashes to Glass ring after my Grandad died. When I eventually had a stack to protect from soapy water when washing dishes, I followed her lead and started taking mine off and placing them on the microwave too.

I took the first pic in 2023. These were my strong independent woman rings, the eternity band is the ring I splurged £60 on after leaving my job for PKM Beth. I felt so bad about that purchase!

In 2026, it’s my Oura ring for tracking my health (or lack thereof…), the repurposed eternity ring that holds said Oura ring in place because the sizing kit was not accurate, and my new Daniella Draper stack, kindly purchased by my lovely boyfriend as an anniversary gift on the first trip I’ve felt really confident to go on since my health woes.

I stood at the sink reflecting on what had changed in 3 years. That reflection lives in the note, with the new picture. I’ll keep that private!

This post could go on and on. What will I do with all the pics I’ve taken, and the thoughts they prompted? What effects will this have on how we book travel and plan things and how will I enact that in my system? What will I say about it and the rest of this week in my review? These are just the threads prompted by my mini-trip, it’s not even the normal rhythm of my days!

This is my personal infrastructure in action. It is the supporting structure of my brain and of my life. It’s custom built and continually in evolution. It responds to the goals I currently have: I want to be receptive to the world I find myself in, I want to give myself space to engage with my curiosity, I want to take action and I want to live a reflective life and then take action based on my reflections.

It’s been fun to zoom in on a specific part of my personal infrastructure. If you’d like to see something in more detail, please let me know!