What is building a capture habit?

Building a capture habit is a concept in personal epistemology: No productivity or thinking system works without a reliable capture reflex. The system is not the bottleneck — the habit that feeds it is.

Example: An engineering lead spends a weekend building an elaborate Notion workspace — databases for projects, reading lists, meeting notes, a personal CRM. Two months later, every database is empty. The architecture is pristine. The capture habit never formed. The system starved to death.

This concept is part of Phase 1 (Perception and Externalization) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for perception and externalization.