No, we're not adding folders

About once a week someone sends me a version of the same request.

"Love Gravity, but could you add folders?" "It would be perfect if I could tag notes." "Any plans for linking notes together?" "An API would be amazing."

My answer to all four is no, and I don't mean "not yet".

That can sound like bad product thinking. You're supposed to listen to the people who use your app, and I do. Gravity has changed a lot since launch: it now has Markdown, checklists, a home screen widget, a Mac app and an Android app. Folders, tags, links and templates are a different kind of request, because each one would break the thing Gravity is for.

Folders

"Could you add folders? I have work stuff and personal stuff and I want to keep them apart."

I understand the instinct. Folders copy the filing cabinet, so they feel natural. The trouble is that categories rarely have clean edges. Borges made fun of this in "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins", which describes an imaginary encyclopaedia that sorts animals into groups such as "those that belong to the emperor" and "those that from a long way off look like flies". Every filing scheme has a little of that in it.

Now put folders into a capture tool. You're in a meeting and someone says something worth keeping. You reach for your phone. Which folder? Work, fine, but which project? Does that project have a folder yet? Should there be a Meetings folder? You have a few seconds before the conversation moves on.

A folder puts a decision between having a thought and saving it. That's a small case of decision fatigue, and sometimes the hesitation costs you the thought. Repeat it for every note, every day, and the system meant to keep you organised is taxing the one moment the app exists for.

Gravity has one stream, so "where does this go?" has one answer. You open the app, type, press Return twice and get on with your day.

Tags

"Tags, then? They're more flexible."

Tags are folders that can overlap, which gives you the same problem in a different shape. I've watched myself do it in other apps. I capture a thought, then spend fifteen seconds choosing between #idea and #project, or #toread and #reference, or trying to remember whether I already made a tag for this sort of thing. By the time I've decided, the thought has faded a little and I've moved from getting it out of my head to doing taxonomy.

Tags also pile up. My old system had over 200, and maybe 30 of them were useful. The rest were spelling variants and experiments I'd forgotten about.

Gravity's answer is prefixes. Start a note with todo: or read: and it gets a colour of its own in the stream. On your phone, type todo: into search and you see only those notes. There's no tag list to manage and no tag field to fill in, because the prefix is the first word of the note. I've written up how I use prefixes in more detail.

Links

"What about [[wikilinks]], like Obsidian or Roam?"

Links look free. You type two brackets and you've made a connection. The cost shows up in the next note you write, when you start wondering whether it connects to something older, whether to link it, and what the backlinks will look like. You're curating a graph now as well as capturing.

If you're building a research database or a personal wiki, that work pays off, and Obsidian is excellent at it. For stray thoughts during the day, links are scaffolding for a building you aren't putting up. In Gravity each note stands on its own. It came out of your head at a particular moment, and it sinks or gets rescued depending on whether it catches your eye later. Time is the only relationship between notes.

Templates

"Could you add a daily template with sections for to-dos and gratitude?"

Templates suit structured thinking, and Gravity is for the unstructured kind. With a template you're filling in boxes, and "What am I grateful for today?" turns into a prompt you feel you ought to answer. Templates also assume every day has the same shape. Mine don't. A capture app should take thoughts in whatever form they arrive.

An API

"I'd love to connect Gravity to my other tools."

An API makes Gravity a node in a bigger system, with other tools pulling from it, pushing into it and automating around it. That changes the part it plays in your day. One stream stops meaning one stream and starts meaning one stream plus exports to Notion plus automation triggers.

Your notes aren't locked in, though. You can share text or a link into Gravity from other apps, and export every note whenever you like. I just don't want Gravity to become plumbing.

The pattern behind the requests

Every one of these requests is about finding things later. Folders find by category, tags by attribute, links by relationship, templates by making notes uniform, and an API by reaching in from somewhere else.

That assumes you'll go looking. Think about the last hundred things you jotted down. How many did you go back and search for? For me it's somewhere around one in ten. The rest did their job when I wrote them, by getting a thought out of my head so I could stop holding onto it.

If retrieval is rare, designing around it is a mistake. Each retrieval feature adds friction at capture, and capture is the one time you're certain to use the app. Gravity is built for capture and handles retrieval in two ways. Search is there when you know what you want, and it can include archived notes. For everything else there's review: you scroll, something catches your eye or it doesn't, and you swipe right on whatever still matters.

The feature treadmill

I've been round this loop more than once. You start with a text file or Apple Notes, and it works. Then you can't find anything, so you move to an app with folders and tags, and for a few weeks it feels like a superpower. Then the tag list sprawls, so you add saved searches and views. Then templates and plugins to manage the views. One day you notice you spend more time maintaining the system than taking notes, and you either start again with a blank text file or give up.

No single app causes this. Each power feature fixes a problem by adding complexity, and the complexity becomes the next problem. Programmers have a rule against it, YAGNI: don't build what you aren't going to need.

Who Gravity is built for

Gravity is built for one person's thoughts through the day: quick capture on your phone or Mac, and a scroll back through now and then. The ideas behind your projects, research and drafts land there first, and the ones that matter get rescued until you act on them.

The features I keep saying no to are what keep that loop fast. With nothing to file, a thought takes a few seconds to write down, and with nothing to maintain, the stream still works after a month of ignoring it.

The question behind the question

When someone asks for folders, they're usually asking how to stay organised. Organisation only helps if it helps you use your notes. So look back over the last month. How much time did you spend inside your notes app filing, tagging, linking and restructuring, and how much capturing and using what you wrote?

If most of it went on upkeep, more organising features will give you more upkeep. Gravity takes the system away. You get one stream, and your attention decides what stays near the top. If your notes app has started to feel like a second job, try going without folders for a month.