In our household, we’d call that a non-zero amount.
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It’s always interesting to see the different ways people manage things. I have through the years tried to use a daily task feature in a task manager. For me it was Things for several years with an occasional dip into Omnifocus, Todoist, or Reminders. What I found was that I was still always creating daily notes and using a calendar, task list, and notes to get through the day.
One day I sat back and thought about it and realized that I have been following the approach of the old Franklin Planners without thinking about it. If you remember the planners, they had a daily calendar of events and task list on one side, and a blank pad for notes on the other.
NotePlan was the first app that really brought those two pages together into one space for me. So now I have my modern Franklin Planner in digital form.
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Indeed, I do! And I used them. I also used the Stephen Covey planner. Both were useful in their time. As far as I recall, there was not a “task manager“ available at the time.
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There’s another one that I’m aware of, and it’s Opus One. Sadly the UI is from the skeuomorphic era (so it really looks like a planner, which I do not want for a desktop app). I used it a couple of month and to me it felt like a very natural workflow, and I have never used something like Franklin Planners.
Setapp is incredibly expensive over the long term for me since a good portion of the apps are pay to own. It all depends on what you use of course, but every time I price out Setapp and what I use, it is not a good deal. I have no doubt there are many people this does not hold true for though, especially NotePlan users, since that is already $100 a year.
I’m seeing if Noteplan will stick for me. Does anyone know if there is a way to have a template automatically populate the daily note, without having to select the template every day?
Not a big deal, but I have a shortcut on iOS set up that allows me to quickly append text under a particular header in the daily note, and I’d like that header to be automatically created so I don’t have to worry about it not being there.
I’ve been testing out NotePlan (for the 3rd time) over the last week, and although here are a load of things to love about it, I keep noticing weird text-editing bugs.
Things like:
- whole chunks of text disappearing (inexplicably) when I press return in the middle of a block of text, trying to break it into paragraphs
- more text disappearing when iPadOs does an autocorrect
Just wondering, does anyone who has used NotePlan a lot also have these sorts of problems?
It seems weird that these sorts of problems would happen … considering that text editing is the must fundamental feature of NotePlan. I’m wondering if there’s something weird I could have done …
Tried NotePlan before and it is nice, helping you plan a day, week, month, year and even quarter. Planning with context with some resources collection. But I can’t find any strong reasons to subscribe in my case.
My opinion is: I hope plain text can play like rich text. Maybe you said there are NotePlan and Obsidian, but the experience is still not smooth. Say on Obsidian the mobile experience, and if you copy images from the web or somewhere, you can’t find it in Finder. I don’t know where they are stored.
iA Writer is great but its goal is writing so visuals are inevitably secondary. I may need to think how I can improve my workflow and try to write more. If I am determined to switch my assets to plain text, I will choose iA (from v7.2 the library is much better).
I know there are many benefits of plain text: using more than an app at the same time, so in an app if some functions are not good (say unable to search something) you can use another app and even just search in Finder. Most importantly there is no limitations in a note, Evernote or UpNote said they have 250MB and 20MB per note; on Bear and Apple Notes if your note is longer the performance can be slower.
While atm I am good overall with Apple Notes, I don’t have time and find out the only way to know if I should switch is just to keep using the current app and observe how it affects me in different ways. My observation is always the best answer of whether I should keep or leave. Now I found sometimes I can’t find some notes on Apple Notes (have to reset Siri and Search) and there are only third party solutions to export. What I am doing right now is to export individual important blog post in mobile app as plain text with attachments (I will need to upload my images to Substack and Squarespace) and pdf respectively as a backup.
I tried for a long time to do task management in Obsidian alongside my working notes, but it had some resistance, not least lack of notifications and integration with Apple Mail. I’ve switched to Reminders which does the job (although I still find it a challenge to have the optimal three items at a time to deal with rather than a growing list. Perhaps another app would be better)
I do, however, use Daily Notes extensively. Or, to be more accurate, I’ve switched from daily notes to weekly notes in Obsidian for greater visibility of what’s going on (I’ve resisted one file per year… but I’m tempted!).
In my ‘daily note’ I don’t to anything particularly clever… I just list thoughts, tasks, ideas, contacts as I encounter them through the week and have them date/time stamped. Linking and tagging allows me to sort them and find them later e.g.,
- 2024-08-12 16:20 Read: about Noteplan on #mpusers and responded with a rather long winded post here
- 2024-08-11 13:01 Writing: Spent the morning writing the outline for [[204-08-18 Sermon on 1 Kings 3]]
- 2024-08-11 11:34: Meating: with [[@JohnSmith]] and received his feedback on the [[New Balloons]] #meeting
- 2024-08-10 19:35: Read: [[James 2]]. Wow!
it’s a beautiful but immensely challenging passage. What “fruit” am I showing my my life? #biblestudy - 2024-08-10 17:40: Sent out: the first draft of the [[2024-09 Newsletter for building renovation stakeholders]]
I can go to any of the linked pages e.g., John Smith’s page, and see all the entries relating to that person/project/entity. Using a daily page reduces friction of recording entries and putting them somewhere - I just hit to the hotkey combination and type in the box. Not everything is useful - sometimes it’s just interstitial journaling in the moment - but the things I need are retrievable through backlinks and search. And it’s always hard to tell in advance what might be useful.
I’ve tried using Apple Notes, but the I’ve struggled with the formatting, lack of backlinks (which is integral to my notetaking) and the sync has been slow in my testing - certainly compared to the instant sync I’ve experienced in Obsidian and Bear.
I’m intrigued by NotePlan, but I’m comfortable with a separate space for tasks and the (relatively) high monthly subscription is a barrier.
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I posted this question when I was part way through the episode, and I should have waited until I had finished the whole thing. David (Sparks) brought up this exact point later in the episode, and mentioned that it is on the developer’s roadmap.
I too am intrigued by NP, but I’m unwilling to spend $120/year for an app when I can forge a workflow for free or far less.
I’m intrigued by your approach to weekly notes. I’ve started doing something very similar but I use Apple Notes and Reminders for the integration.
In Apple Notes, I have key pinned notes, including my weekly and yearly goals.
My weekly goals provide a bird’s eye view of my week.
Finally, I used Reminders for the nitty-gritty of my day and projects.
That said, I like the system you described. It has me wondering to what extent I could replicate it in Apple Notes.
This can be handled by creating a Smart List that includes flagged items with relative dates.
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Agreed. I can see how people can get that kind of additional value from it - I’m just not one of them!
Your post is interesting. I need to think more about goals vs tasks. There are a number of things I list as tasks in reminders that stick around a while, because they’re generalised goals and I just don’t break them down. And yearly goals are something I would very much benefit from! Thanks for sharing.
I’d like to use Apple Notes, but the lack of backlinks makes it difficult… although thinking about it more perhaps search would be sufficient. For example, using @mrsmith to denote a person would make it easy to search for notes that have that person mentioned, and I see Notes goes straight to the text in the note. Unfortunately the search results don’t seem to give the context (i.e., surrounding text) so it’s hard to see at a glance what I might have said about Mr Smith without going into each note.
A couple of things to keep in mind.
- You can create tags and also Smart Folders. I quickly find things with tags and I’ve created several Smart Folders.
- AN has backlinks. They are not as sophisticated as those in Obsidian, but they work fine for my needs. And, one can use key board shortcuts to navigate quickly between notes: Cmd + [ or Cmd + ]
Actually, AFAIK, Apple Notes hás note links which are links to one of your notes.
Backlinks are a different concept. They make a way to find all the notes that link to a given note.
To explore the differences: one can link a Meeting note A, and a Meeting note B to a Mr. Smith note in Apple Notes. But looking inside the Mr. Smith note will not show that both notes A and B are linked to that note. Even if you navigate from note A to the Mr. Smith note and then press the shortcut to move back, there’s no way besides searching from the main interface to get to Note B from the Mr. Smith note.
Backlinks, on the other hand, will show up on the Mr. Smith note showing that both note A and note B are linked to the Mr. Smith Note. So one could go from Note A to the Mr. Smith note and from there to the Note B.
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You are correct and I stand corrected. Thank you for setting the record straight, I should have been more accurate. 
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Forgive me - and I do write this with my tongue in my cheek - but I think you should have been more accurate, rather than precise.
That said … I could be entirely wrong.
Changed.
……………………
NotePlan costs $9.99/month
SetApp (for 1 Mac) which includes NotePlan costs $9.99/month
SetApp (for 1 Mac & 4 iOS devices) which includes NotePlan costs $12.49/month
Makes you wonder how developers make any money when they sign up with SetApp?
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Apologies if this has been stated already:
Does the annual fee include all OSes?
Free is better (AN, Reminders etc) but I can’t use those at work, I can access NP web at work.