Attention Is the Only Organization System That Works

Every note-taking system is trying to solve the same problem: how do you find the right note at the right time?

Folders solve it by location. Tags solve it by attribute. Links solve it by relationship. Search solves it by keyword.

Gravity solves it differently: it puts the notes that have recently captured your attention at the top, and lets everything else sink.

This sounds almost too simple to work. But there's a reason attention-based organization outperforms all the clever schemes.

By the end of this post, you'll understand:

• Why your attention is a better curator than any tagging system
• How the sinking mechanic turns review into automatic organization
• The cognitive science behind "rescue" as a sorting algorithm

The problem with explicit organization

Every explicit organization system has the same failure mode: you have to know how you'll want to find something before you know you'll want to find it.

When you file a note into a folder, you're predicting your future retrieval context. Will I look for this under "Work" or "Project X" or "Ideas"? You're guessing.

When you tag a note, you're predicting future queries. Will I search by topic, by status, by source? You're guessing.

When you create a link, you're predicting future connections. Will this note be relevant to that other note? You're guessing.

Sometimes you guess right. Often you don't. And the cost of guessing wrong is that the note becomes invisible to your future self—filed in the wrong folder, tagged with the wrong term, linked to the wrong cluster.

Meanwhile, every decision costs time and cognitive energy at capture. The organization overhead is front-loaded, paid for every note, regardless of whether you ever retrieve it.

Attention doesn't guess

Here's what's different about attention-based organization:

You don't decide what's important upfront. You decide during review, when you actually encounter the note again.

At that moment, you're not guessing. You're responding to the note in real-time, with full context about what you're currently thinking about, working on, and interested in. The decision "is this worth keeping top-of-mind?" happens when you have maximum information, not minimum.

If the note catches your attention, you rescue it. If it doesn't, it sinks. The organization emerges from repeated interaction, not upfront prediction.

What "catching your attention" actually means

Let's get precise about what's happening when you scroll through your stream and something snags your focus.

You're not reading every note carefully. You're skimming—a few words, maybe the first line, then move on. Most notes pass by without registering.

But some notes pull you in. You pause. You read the whole thing. You feel something—interest, urgency, recognition, curiosity. Something in the note resonates with something in your current mental state.

This resonance isn't random. It's your brain's pattern-matching system finding a connection between the note and something active in your working memory—a current project, a recent conversation, an ongoing preoccupation.

When you rescue that note, you're not just organizing—you're surfacing a connection you didn't explicitly create. The note became relevant because your context changed, not because you tagged it correctly.

Folders can't do this. Tags can't do this. Only attention can, because only attention has access to your current context.

The sinking mechanic as automatic archiving

Here's what sinking really does: it archives automatically, based on the only signal that matters.

In traditional systems, archiving is an active decision. You decide a note is "done" or "no longer relevant" and move it somewhere. This creates anxiety—what if I'm wrong? What if I need it later?—and decision fatigue. Another micro-choice to make.

In Gravity, archiving is passive. If you don't rescue a note, it sinks. No decision required. The absence of attention is the signal.

And the archive isn't a black hole—you can scroll back, you can search. The note isn't deleted. But it's no longer competing for your attention during daily review. It's gracefully receded, making room for what's current.

This is how attention works naturally. Things that aren't reinforced fade from immediate access. Gravity just makes the process visible.

The review session as sorting algorithm

Think of each review session as running a sorting algorithm across your notes.

You start at the top of your stream. You scroll down, skimming. Every note you see is a comparison: is this more relevant than where it currently sits?

If you rescue something from lower in the stream, you're saying "this should be higher." The note moves to the top.

If you don't rescue something, you're implicitly saying "this is fine where it is, or lower." The note stays, and gets pushed down by whatever you capture next.

Over many review sessions, the stream self-organizes. Notes that consistently capture attention accumulate at the top. Notes that don't, drift to the bottom.

You never explicitly sort anything. The sorting happens as a side effect of attention.

Why doesn't this get overwhelming?

Fair question. If everything starts at the top and only sinks through neglect, won't the stream become an endless scroll of half-relevant notes?

Three mechanisms prevent this:

1. Natural capture rate. You're only adding a few notes per day. The inflow is manageable.

2. The swipe-to-archive gesture. When you see a todo that's done or a note that's served its purpose, you swipe left to archive it explicitly. It leaves the stream entirely.

3. The sinking itself. Notes you don't rescue sink fast enough that your regular review stays bounded. You're not re-evaluating every note you've ever captured—just the top of the stream plus the occasional deeper scroll.

The stream stays workable because most notes should sink. They served their purpose at capture time. The ones that stick around are the exceptions—the ideas still cooking, the todos still undone, the references still relevant.

Hold up—doesn't this require constant review?

Not constant. Regular.

The mechanic works best with a brief daily review—a minute or two scrolling through recent notes. If you skip a few days, the stream is still there; you just have a bit more to review.

What you don't need is elaborate weekly reviews, inbox zero processing, or systematic maintenance. The sinking is automatic. The only active ingredient is occasionally skimming and rescuing what matters.

Compare this to the maintenance burden of other systems: reorganizing folders, pruning tags, updating links, processing inboxes. Gravity's maintenance is "scroll and swipe." That's it.

What you get

After weeks of using Gravity, you'll notice something:

The top of your stream isn't what you most recently captured. It's what you most recently cared about. The notes that have survived repeated review, that keep catching your attention, that you keep rescuing.

This is organization by attention. It's self-correcting—the stream updates as your focus changes. It requires no upfront decisions and minimal maintenance.

No system built on folders or tags or links can do this. They organize by attributes. Gravity organizes by what actually matters to you.

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The only organization is attention. Let it do the work.