10 Tips For Using Notes More Effectively

0:00 Hi, this is Gary with macmos.com. Here are some tips for using the notes app more effectively. So, I often hear from people having trouble organizing the notes app, dealing with having lots of different notes, trying to figure out how to more efficiently use notes to get things done. So, here are some tips for doing just that. Some of these tips you may like and be able to incorporate into how you work with notes where others may not fit as well. Notes is a very open app. So how each person uses notes will vary greatly. But here are some tips that I find help me and may help you as well. So often when you want to record some information in a note, you don't want to take the time to create a new note right then. So you can just have a

0:45 note that you keep adding to. I call it a draft note or something like that where you just keep adding new things to it and then only later on break them off into their own notes or take an action and just remove them from this. You also may find this happens inside of a regular note. So you create a note and you start putting information into it and then you find maybe some information in there would be better off in its own note. So don't be afraid to do just that. take information in a note and cut it from that note and create a new one and put that information in there, creating two separate notes. If the notes are still related, you can then link note to note. So, an easy way to do that is just use the greater than symbol

1:31 twice and then you can choose from a list here. So, I'll choose that second note. So, now when I'm on this note here, I could easily jump to that other note and I could also have a link back to the first note if I want. so I can have things in separate notes but easily navigate between them. If you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support Macost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macost.com/patreon. Now, I assume you're using the list view here, not gallery view. And in list view, you're going to see your notes grouped together by how old they are. But if you have some important notes, you may want to pin them to the top. So, all you need to do for that is select the note, go to file, and pin note. But you could also control-click, right click, or

2:17 two-finger click on a trackpad and choose pin note there. And then you'll have this pinned section at the top. But be careful not to have too many notes in pinned. At some point, it just loses its usefulness if you have too many notes pinned up here. I try to keep only two or three notes pinned. You may want to have a few more, but I can definitely see there being a problem if you have more than 10 notes pinned to the top. And remember, it's really easy to pin and then unpin a note. So, it's okay to pin a note that you know you're using a lot today or this week, but then normally have it unpinned when you're not using it so much. Folders are another thing I see overused a lot. You can create new folders and then move some of your notes into these folders to organize them. But then things get messy

3:03 again once you have too many folders. And I've talked to people that have hundreds of folders and at that point they kind of start to lose their value. So I also try to keep the number of folders to 10 or less. If you find you have tons of folders, you may want to switch to using tags. So for instance, here you can see the lectures I have all tagged with lecture here. And I can easily go to tags. I can have lots of those and just view one tag and see all of the notes with that tag in them. So I can have my most important categories as folders, but then beyond that have lots of different tags that I use and just put all of these notes into some general folder or archive folder. Now let's talk

3:48 about individual notes. When putting information into a note, it's usually important to come up with your own kind of shortorthhand. You don't need to write full complete sentences and paragraphs and fill the node up. In general, you want to have as few words in the note as possible. Just enough to remind you of some information or allow you to see information in a quick manner that you can easily review. Remember, you can use things like bolding words or italics or highlighting. All sorts of different formatting here for making the note easier for you to see. Think of a note like this. A note is just for you. Optimize it for just you. Make it easy to add information to it and review the information in it. But if a note is

4:34 meant to be viewed by somebody else, then consider that it shouldn't be a note at all, but a document created in pages or Word or whatever. Notes are just for you. Documents are meant to be seen by other people. Now, the main reason that the notes app gets crowded and messy is because you've got too many notes in it. You want to archive notes. If you don't need a note anymore, you can select it and you can archive it in many different ways. You can simply go to file and then export as PDF. And this will create a PDF version of the note. And this is ideal for when you don't ever want to change the note again. So for instance, this is a college lecture here. If I'm done with a course, I certainly don't want to even accidentally go back in and change my class notes. I just want to archive it

5:20 and have it permanently stored somewhere. But if you think you may still want to work with it in the future, then another option is to go to file and then open in pages. And this will take the note, open it as a pages document, and then you could save it and put it somewhere. It's already got the name of the note there, but you can give it a different one. You can organize as you like, but you can always go back in and open it up again as a pages document where it's fully editable. But of course you could also just select all command A and copy and then paste this into say a text edit either plain text or rich text document and save it that way to have an editable document that is smaller than a pages document. But the important thing of course is once you archive something to delete it from your notes to make

6:06 your notes library here easier to handle. Another thing you may want to do is look at notes that are basically just scans or photos. A lot of times we scan something into the notes app, say on our iPhone, and we end up with a note like this. It's just one PDF document. You can save this out of notes pretty easily. In fact, if you just click up here at the top and drag, it can export as a PDF. You can also click here and then choose open attachment. And then it opens up in preview and you can save it to wherever you want. And then once you've got this out and stored somewhere proper, maybe in your documents folder, you can then get rid of this node. So what you may want to do is set aside a time every week to go through your notes. This is when you would archive

6:53 notes you no longer need. Maybe export some PDFs from different notes and then maybe get rid of the note if you don't need it. But also in that draft note, go through it and see if there's something you just don't need anymore. Maybe something else needs to be copied and pasted into its own note and expanded on. And maybe set yourself the goal during that weekly notes review to actually have an empty draft note ready for new information. Also, during that time, don't forget to look at the titles of notes. Sometimes they're not exactly what you want for the long run. You just gave it a quick title to get going and make your weekly review a chance to rename the notes properly. You can also use tags from more than just categorizing notes. You can have special

7:39 tags for things like say review to indicate that for this note you want to review it at the end of the week or maybe mark something to delete showing that at the end of the week you probably want to delete this note. And it's easy to actually go through here then and see all of your notes that are tagged with delete or review or archive or even just rename indicating that you want to come up with a better name for the note. You can use a tag like this or possibly create a folder if you don't already have too many to hold notes that you want to archive or delete in the future, but you just don't have time to do it right now. And then when you do have time, you can go into that folder or

8:24 look at that tag and take care of those notes. Having a delete tag or to be deleted folder can be this extra step where you can indicate that you do want to delete this note, but you just want to check it one more time later on to make sure there's nothing in it you need before you actually delete it. And here's one last tip. This one doesn't actually have to do with organizing or anything, but it's just a useful technique when you want to use notes, but you don't have enough room on the screen for your notes app and for what it is you're reading or writing. So, how do you keep both kind of on the screen at the same time? Well, you can pop out an individual note. Just double click it here. Then under window, select keep on top. Now, if I go to the Safari window

9:10 back here, no matter what I do here, the notes window stays on top. I could move it around and resize it as I like and put it somewhere else, but it'll always stay on top of other windows, allowing me to easily take notes. And then I could just close it and it goes back to the regular notes window, which doesn't stay on top. So, hope you found some of these suggestions useful. If you've got a tip for others to help them use notes more effectively, leave it in the comments below. [Music] If you like this video, click the thumbs up button below to let me know. I publish new tutorials each weekday. Hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out.