Inspired by MacSparky’s recent newsletter about productivity, I decided to revisit my own current workflow. My existing workflow existed of two main apps, Things for tasks and Obsidian for notes. I’m still happy with these two apps, but they fall down in a few areas that I think I can approve by adding Apple Notes to the mix. I did explore Noteplan a bit, but I’ve using Obsidian for 5+ years now and didn’t think it brought anything new to the table outside of being very well designed and having good mobile apps.
First problem is that the mobile app for Obsidian is pretty bad. It’s OK for looking up things, but pretty terrible for creating new notes or editing existing notes. Syncing notes is also bad, maybe that’s Apples fault since I’m using iCloud to sync. One of the biggest problems being that the iPhone app is actually unusable until the sync is done. But in any case even if that was perfect, the editing, still bad.
Second problem is that Things is a really great app in almost every way, it still has one limitation that at this point I don’t believe will ever be solved. There are no attachments allowed in Things. It turns out when I want to add a pdf, photo, screenshot, etc to my inbox to deal with later, you just can’t do it.
So considering these two issues, I’ve decided to use Notes as my universal inbox. I process what’s in this inbox at least once a day and put things I want to keep or act on beyond today in Things or Obsidian. I liking having my Inbox outside my two “production” systems. Junk tends to pile up in your inbox and when it is in Obsidian or Things, they can become distractions to what’s really important. I also find Notes to be really great at quick capture. On the iPad I love that I can just tap the screen with my Apple Pencil and jot down a quick note. And speaking of quick notes, I’ve really found it handy to do quick capture of all sorts of things. A webpage I want to dig into, quick notes allows you to highlight a bit of text and add a link to your note with the quote highlighted. I’m using this a lot. A photo or pdf I want to use, attach to a note and then process it later. You can attach all sorts of things, including voicemails. So if I get a voicemail I want to act on now, I’ll attach it to a note. This way, I only have to look at one inbox for everything. I didn’t realize how important this is. Before I’d have to look at several apps, photos, phone (for voicemail), download folder for pdfs etc. Now I have 1 Inbox with everything.
I also like that Apple Notes allows me to draw and hand write notes. Even though most of what I want to capture I ultimately want to add to Obsidian as markdown text of some kind, it can be handy to draw a little diagram or take a photo of a phone number on a sign I want to call later. The other great thing about Apple Notes is that they have an export to markdown option. I didn’t notice this before I started exploring this new workflow, I assume it is a recent addition, maybe iOS 26? But this obviously makes it really easy to move to Obsidian.
So to summarize, Apple Notes has become my quick capture inbox. I then process these items into my two main systems. This keeps the ephemeral stuff out of there and also takes the burden off of Obsidian to being good on mobile, which I don’t think it will ever be.
One other thing I’ve tweaked in my workflow is to really start using Tab Groups in safari. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before, but I create a tab group for a long running project and put all links I need in there. I’m sure I’m not unique in having 50+ tabs open in Safari by the end of the day and it can be really hard to find the one I need. So actually being deliberate and putting tabs in groups related to projects really helps. It also makes it possible to work on these projects when I’m out and about and can access the same groups on my iPhone.
