Capturing things in Station
Capture is the front door. The whole point of Station is that getting a thought in should be instant — no choosing a folder, no deciding what kind of thing it is up front. You drop it, and Station helps you shape it afterwards.
● As at 5 September 2026 · one box, three levels of pushback, eight front doors
← Back to the Station overview · See also: the grand tour · from idea to done
The box makes ideas — and only ideas
This is the thing I got wrong when I first wrote this page. The Capture screen used to be described as "one box, eight shapes", as if the composer changed what it produced. It doesn’t.
Capture always creates an idea. That’s the record type that gets challenged, gets a completeness score, and lands in the triage queue. The switch mode list down the right-hand side isn’t a mode switch at all — each entry is a link to a different page for a different kind of record.
Which matters for one practical reason: those links navigate away, so anything already typed in the box is gone. Capture the idea first, then go.
Underneath the box there’s an optional title (Station names the thing itself if you leave it blank), and Ctrl + Enter submits without reaching for the mouse.
How hard should it push back?
The three buttons under the box decide how hard Station argues with me, not what gets saved:
- Park — no questions. Saved, parked, come back to it whenever.
- Triage — the default. Exactly one sharp follow-up question.
- Dig — up to three, for something I actually want thought about.
Whichever I pick, the idea is saved immediately and the thinking happens afterwards, in the background. I can close the page and the questions still finish.
A parked idea isn’t a dead end either — it can be picked up and run through the challenge engine later, when I’m ready to think about it properly.
The optional details are a lock, not a hint
Behind Optional: importance, desired action, timeframe are three dropdowns, and all three start at let Station guess:
| Field | What it’s for | The choices |
|---|---|---|
| Importance | how much this matters | low · medium · high · critical |
| Desired action | what I want to happen to it | capture only · research · build · decide · discuss |
| When | roughly, when | now · soon · someday · blocked |
Anything left on guess gets filled in by Station. Anything I pick myself is never overwritten, even if the idea is re-run later. That’s what "Station won’t override it" means on the form: set them when I already know, leave them alone when I don’t.
Those same three fields are three of the five parts of an idea’s completeness score — 20% each for having a title, a body of some length, an importance, a desired action and a timeframe. Which is worth saying out loud: 100% means five boxes are filled in, not that the idea is any good. Judging that is still my job.
The other seven doors
Everything else has its own front door, reachable from the same Capture menu in the sidebar or from the switch-mode list:
| Door | For | What Station does with it |
|---|---|---|
| Bookmark | a URL worth keeping | fetches and indexes the page, writes a synopsis, classifies it, and keeps my note on why — then watches it and tells me weekly if it changed underneath me |
| File | anything to ingest | chunked, embedded, searchable — and readable in the browser without downloading it |
| Note | a raw observation | stored as-is, deliberately with no model passes |
| Task | something to do | lands in Tasks; can be attached to a plan, or assigned to an agent |
| Plan | a multi-step arc | becomes a plan with tasks and a finish line |
| Recording | a voice memo | transcribed locally and followed up |
| Wiki page | a canonical reference | added to the in-app wiki and the knowledge index |
The idea door is still the one I reach for most, because it’s the only one that gets actively argued with.
Things that arrive without me
The biggest change since July isn’t in the box at all — it’s how much lands in Station without me opening it.
- Email. Mail that arrives in the connected mailbox is read, judged and either handled or surfaced. Anything containing a commitment doesn’t silently become a task: it pre-fills the task box with the email linked as its source, and I decide. Autopilot is earned, not assumed.
- Meetings. The commitments I make out loud get pulled out of the transcript and proposed. Since 28 August 2026 each recording is matched to the actual meeting in my calendar, so a commitment arrives already attached to the right project.
- The evening call. The debrief captures the work I did but never tracked — created and closed in one motion, after I approve it out loud.
- My phone. The Android app captures by voice, and pushes deep-link straight back into whatever needs me.
- Other agents. Station exposes an MCP server, so a tool like Claude Desktop can drop findings into the same brain — with a write token, and with every write logged.
- Hermes. The overnight thinker can turn one of its own suggestions into a real captured idea, which then goes through triage exactly like something I typed.
Every one of those routes goes through the same single capture path, which is deliberate: an idea is always the same five records underneath, however it arrived, so nothing turns up half-built and unsearchable.
What happens next
Once something’s in:
- Ideas get challenged, then sorted onto the Triage queue — which is ordered by what’s been waiting on a decision longest, not by what’s loudest.
- The keepers get promoted into plans and tasks. That journey has its own guide: From idea to done →.
- Everything gets embedded on the way in, so it’s findable by meaning as well as by word from the moment it exists.
← Back to the Station overview.