Capturing things in Station

Capture is the front door. The whole point of Station is that getting a
thought in should be instant and frictionless — no choosing a folder, no
deciding "is this a note or a task?" up front. You dump it, and Station
helps you shape it afterwards.

← Back to the Station overview · See also: the grand tour ·
planning & doing the work

The capture composer and its eight modes

Jump to: One box, eight shapes · Keyboard-fast capture · Challenge levels · Body, tags & details · Beyond the box · What happens next

One box, eight shapes

Everything goes through the same composer, but you can tell Station what
kind of thing you’re capturing. Each mode tunes the fields and what
happens next:

Mode	For	What Station does with it
💡 Idea	a half-thought, a maybe, a "what if"	runs it through the challenge engine and into triage
🔖 Bookmark	a URL worth keeping	fetches and indexes the page, keeps your note on why
📝 Note	a raw observation	stored as-is, deliberately no LLM passes
✅ Task	something to do	lands in Tasks; can be attached to a plan
🗂️ Plan	a multi-step arc	becomes a plan with steps
📄 Document	a file to ingest	chunked, embedded, and made searchable
🎙️ Recording	a voice memo	captured for transcription and follow-up
📚 Wiki page	canonical reference	added to the in-app wiki and the knowledge index

The Idea mode is the one you’ll reach for most — it’s the only one
that gets actively challenged.

Capture fast, without touching the mouse

The composer is built to get out of your way:

Paste a URL → Station recognises it and switches to Bookmark.
Prefix with / → it becomes a Task.
Alt + a letter → jump straight to a mode (e.g. Idea, Bookmark, Note…).
Markdown toolbar with the usual shortcuts (Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, headings, lists, links).
Ctrl+↵ → capture and challenge in one keystroke.
Drafts auto-save as you type, so a half-written thought is never lost.

How hard should it push back?

When you capture an idea, you choose how much you want to be
challenged — because not everything deserves an interrogation:

Park — just hold onto it; don’t ask me anything.
Triage — ask me one sharp follow-up question.
Dig — go deeper, with up to three follow-ups.

A parked idea can always be picked up later and re-run through the
challenge engine when you’re ready to think about it properly.

Body, tags, and the details

Markdown body — write as much or as little as you like, with live
formatting.
Tags — attach topics as you go; Station also uses them later as a
retrieval signal.
Optional structure — importance, desired action, and a rough
timeframe, if you want to give the idea a head start.

Capture isn’t only the box

Things can land in Station without you opening it at all:

Email — forward something to the connected mailbox (via Microsoft
Graph) and it’s ingested automatically — and the inbox triage
turns what arrives on its own into proposed actions.
Voice, from my pocket — the mobile app captures by voice, and the
evening debrief call captures the day’s untracked
work without me typing a thing.
Meetings — the commitments I make out loud get extracted from
meeting audio and proposed as tasks.
API / MCP — other tools and agents can drop items in through the
agent surface (see the overview).

What happens next

Once something’s captured, it flows into the rest of Station:

Ideas get challenged, then sorted on the Triage queue.
The keepers get promoted into plans and tasks — that whole journey
has its own guide: From idea to done →.

← Back to the Station overview.