One tree to rule them all: the case for a unified node model
When you open a typical knowledge tool, you're immediately asked to make a choice: is this a page? A database? A folder? A doc?
These distinctions feel meaningful at first. They become friction fast.
The container problem
Notion popularized the idea that everything can be a database, and then a page inside that database, and then a database inside that page. It's clever. It's also how you end up with a workspace where finding anything requires knowing whether the thing you want is a "linked database view" or a "table inline block" or a "full-page database child."
Google Drive goes the other way — everything is a file inside a folder. Clean, familiar, and completely useless for structured information. A drive full of Google Docs is just a slightly more organized desktop.
A simpler model: nodes all the way down
In Nexus, there's one concept: a node. A node has a type — document, folder, or calendar entry — and it can contain other nodes. That's it.
A folder isn't a special container. It's a node that happens not to have editor content. A calendar entry isn't a separate system. It's a document node with a date attached. Moving something from a folder into a teamspace isn't a migration. It's changing a parent pointer.
This sounds like an implementation detail. In practice, it changes how you think about your workspace. You don't need to decide whether a "Launch Plan" is a document or a database. You just create it, nest everything that belongs to it inside it, and move on.
Why this matters for teams
The biggest cost of complex tool models isn't learning time — it's organizational friction. When every new piece of information requires a decision about what type of thing it is, people stop documenting. They default to the path of least resistance: a Slack message or a Drive doc that nobody will find in six months.
A simpler model means your team can capture first and organize later. The tree accommodates both the quick scratch note and the carefully structured project brief. They're the same kind of thing; they just live in different places.