I have been on a spirit quest for the best notes app for my work and home situation. I’ve tried them all, and have landed back at the native apple notes app. I think I’ll be happy with that, assuming I can figure out how to structure things.
What’s your organizational structure within the notes app? How do you handle real-time note-taking? For instance, if you supervise someone, and keep notes on those supervision meetings, does everything with that one person go into one long running note, or do you start a new note for every time you sit down together? How do you go from meeting to meeting with notes?
I already migrate out all of my action items and to-dos into Things, and am happy with that process.
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I use and really like Apple Notes. I have my notes organized into in three main buckets. @Dashboard, Project Support, and Reference.
Under @Dashboard, I have subfolders named “Add Info to,” Agenda, Percolating, and my SOP (standard operating procedures) folder. Other than the SOP folder, the notes in this section are ephemeral and are archived or deleted when I’m done with whatever I need them for. “Add info to” is a bucket for me to store something until I’m ready to put it were it belongs: a recipe in paprika, a contact in my contacts app, etc. Percolating has notes for thoughts and ideas that I have, half-baked project ideas, etc.
Project Support has any materials I need for a project I’m currently working on, it has subfolders for each of my various roles. The items in here also are not intended to be retained in Apple Notes permanently. The notes are archived when the project has been completed.
I have a special folder called zArchive (so it alphabetizes at the end) where I move all notes ready to be archived as PDFs for back up and deletion from Notes.
Reference are all the semi-permanent notes that I keep. This contains an alphabetically ordered list of folders named after various topics. For example, I have a folder for software reference where I keep howtos and guides. I have folders for my kids school, kids athletics, and even for observations I have made about each of them.
I don’t do a lot of real-time note taking in Notes. Sometimes I do, but I generally use GoodNotes for that kind of thing. For any kind of supervisory notes, I’d keep those in my agendas folder with a subfolder for each person/team I’m supervising. Or I might put them in a reference subfolder.
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Thanks. That’s really helpful. I also found on the Bear app support site an automator workflow that will export your apple notes to html, which worked great. It seems to be super useful even if you’re not going to switch to their app.
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