Captures: stop texting yourself
The links, screenshots and files you'd otherwise send yourself on WhatsApp or Slack, kept in one inbox: a notes to self app that turns what you save into tasks, habits, events or projects when you're ready.
What you can do with Captures
- One inbox for what you'd send yourself. Save a web link, a video link, an image or a document from the "Save something" buttons.
- Share from your Android phone. Once Xale is installed on Android, send a link, a photo or a file into it from any app's share menu.
- Titles fill themselves in. Add a link in Xale and its title and description are fetched for you. Video links show the channel too.
- Name it your way. Click a capture's title to rename it.
- Turn it into something. When a capture is ready to act on, turn it into a task, a habit, an event or a project.
- Find it again. Give captures areas, then search, sort or group them by area. Archive what you're done with.
- Worth knowing: Captures is part of Xale Pro.
Why I stopped texting myself notes
My WhatsApp and Slack messages to myself were full of things to read later, remember or look up. They moved links and screenshots between my phone and my laptop, but they were never a place I could reliably find them again, and they certainly never turned into anything. Captures gave those links and fragments a proper inbox, one step away from becoming the task or plan they were meant to be.
Rachit, founder of Xale
The ideas behind Captures
Catch it now, decide later
Deciding what something is worth takes more effort than keeping it. Separate the two.
- Worth reading: David Allen, Getting Things Done (2001). Collect everything into one trusted inbox first, and decide what each thing means later, in one sitting.
- The usual way: a chat with yourself, scrolling back through weeks of links to find the one you meant.
- In this release: one inbox for links, videos, images and documents, with "Turn into…" for when you're ready.
Letting go is part of keeping
An inbox only stays useful if some things are allowed to leave it.
- Worth reading: Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011). Decide what to keep one item at a time, and let the rest go with thanks.
- In this release: archive what you're done with; it leaves your inbox but can still be found.
Further reading
- E. J. Masicampo and Roy F. Baumeister, "Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2011). Writing down what to do about an open loop quiets it. doi:10.1037/a0024192
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