How to Organize Apple Notes: Tags, Folders & Smart Folders Explained

0:00 Apple's Notes is a phenomenal tool for storing all sorts of documents and information, for sharing and collaborating with those documents, and for making sure that you always have the information you need right at your fingertips, no matter what device you've got in front of you. But if you use Notes a lot, it can also become unbelievably cluttered, disorganized, and force you to search every time you need to find anything. Want to know how to fix that? Stick around, I've got you covered. I'm Dylan Stewart. And in this video, we're going to continue our conversation all about Apple Notes. In today's lesson, we're going to talk specifically about how to organize your notes so you aren't

0:46 having to hunt around all the time, search through them, and deal with all that clutter. Stay tuned for my MacWhisperer power tip because this one is a mic drop. Let's hop on over to the phone, jump into Notes, And get started. We're going to start things off with some basic sorting tools. And the first one is how you are sorting the notes within your folders. When you open up any given folder, it's generally going to be organized by date edited. You can double check by clicking the three dots in the upper right hand corner here and opening up the sort by section here. You'll see , it's set on date edited, which is the default. Date edited means that even if a note was created. a long time ago, if you come into that note and make any changes, even just pressing the space bar or adding a single character in there, it

1:33 will immediately take that note, and lift it all the way to the top of your notes page. This is a great and easy way to keep track of the notes that you're working on most regularly, but it's not the only way you can sort it. You can also come up to the three dots and change it to sort by title. I'm constantly hearing people ask me how to sort notes by title, and while, it's easy to do. It's not really an effective way to sort things because if you've got tons and tons of notes, unless the note you're working on is up in the A's, you're going to find yourself scrolling regularly to get to that note that you were working on five minutes ago. It's not the best way to do it, but on occasion you may want to switch to the title sort in order to find something quickly. The other sort option that we have is the

2:19 date created option, and the date created option means that Things stay organized by when they were first created. Again, this is helpful, but not the best way to do things because if you edit a note from back in February, it stays in February. And now when I'm up at the top and working on my current notes, it's down at the bottom and I'm constantly having to search to find it. So my first tip is to leave it set on date edited the majority of the time so that when you work on, change, or edit a document, it comes up to the top and it's easy for you to find. But it's still not a perfect way to sort things because sometimes there's a document you created months and months and months ago, that you haven't edited recently and you don't want to keep

3:04 going into notes to raise it up to the top, which is where a concept called pinning notes comes in. Pinning notes allows you to take any note, no matter when it was created or when it was edited, and bring it up to the top of your list, perpetually. It's easy to do by swiping from the left side of the note to the right like this and clicking on the pin. If you do a quick swipe from the left to the right, it will automatically do it without you needing to click the pin. You can also do it by pressing and holding on any note and choosing pin note from the bottom. When you do that, that note will rise up to the top in a pin section and it will stay there forever. But be careful, don't add 50 or 60 pin notes because it's going to make it hard to find the important notes because they'll be lost under the other important notes. There's better tools that we'll talk about

3:50 in this session , but adding a handful of pin notes can make it really easy to find things. Be aware that when you pin a note inside of a specific folder, like here, it will be pinned at the top of this folder, but When you come into your All folder, it will also be pinned there. So it's not the only sorting tool, but it's the first one you want to master. find those important notes that you're constantly hunting for, searching for, or editing, and bring them up to the top to make it easy for you to find them. The next tip is folders. Folders are an easy and simple way for you to sort notes so that you aren't always having to search for them. Before you've created any folders, you may find that you only have one folder and it's called Notes . To create a new folder, click on the folder

4:36 icon in the lower left hand corner like this. Then simply give that folder a basic title. Once you create that first folder, you may notice that you now have three folders. One called All, maybe All iCloud, or All. Mac, or All. Gmail. One called Notes, and the new folder that you created. Each of these folders has a very specific purpose. The All folder shows all notes no matter what folder they're inside of. The Notes folder shows all notes that have not been put into any other folder yet. In other words, It's the unsorted folder. And then we've got the folder we've created. Moving a note into a folder is easy to do. You can do it right from this screen by pressing and holding on a note and clicking where it says

5:21 move and selecting your new folder like this. You can also do it by swiping from the right side here and clicking the folder icon. Or, you can even do it with multiple notes at the same time by clicking the three dots in the upper right hand corner, choosing Select Notes, clicking whichever ones you want, and then clicking the Move button and moving them into your new folder. As you move notes into folders, you'll notice that they leave the Notes folder to go into your specific folder. But everything can be found in the all folder, no matter what subfolder or folder it's in. Once you start creating multiple folders, you can fall into a trap of having too many folders and too many subfolders. Remember to keep things simple. Use basic categories like, work, or Personal,

6:08 Travel, or Finances. Stay away from creating folders if you don't have more than two notes to put into them. You can always create a folder later to add multiple notes in, but if you've only got one note, it doesn't really deserve a folder. Try to find a more basic category, again, like Work or Personal, to put that note into so that it's not just sitting loose in the notes folder itself. You can look inside of any folder by simply clicking on it, and it will show you all of the sub folders and also all of the notes that are inside of that parent folder. You can create sub folders and sub sub folders to your heart's content, but don't go crazy, or you'll make it harder to find what you're looking for instead of easier. Remember to come into your notes folder regularly in order to take any of the unsorted

6:53 notes and put them away. Let's do that now. I'll click the three dots in the upper right corner, click select notes, we'll grab these three right here, click move, and let's drop all of those into our examples folder. They now leave the notes folder, but we can find them easily right here. So that's how you use folders to create some organization so that you aren't constantly searching for stuff, but can instead go directly to what you need. without having to hunt for it. Which leads us into the next tip, tags. If you are on your folder list here and come to the very bottom, you may see a section called tags. If you don't see it, it may just be closed. Click the little yellow arrow to the right side to change it from the closed view to the open view. And if you haven't created any tags yet, Don't

7:41 worry, we're going to do that in just a moment. Just like when you're pinning notes or creating folders, you don't want to overdo it. You want to create a handful of tags that can help you find notes that are otherwise scattered around. For example, I collect all sorts of recipes in my notes app and share them with my wife. They're in this recipes folder, but we've sorted all of those recipes into categories like burgers, or chicken, or duck, or fish, which means that when it's time to decide what to cook, I have to go into this folder, and then I have to go into this folder, and then I have to go into this folder. But they're all recipes, so instead of leaving them in all these separate folders, if you tag them all with a hashtag like recipes, when you click on the recipes list, it brings all of them up. in one list so that I can find exactly

8:27 what I'm looking for. Once you are looking inside of a tag section up at the top, you're going to see the options of adding additional tags on. For example, my wife and I have tagged the recipes we like the most with a hashtag liked tag, which means that if I click this , it's going to find all of the notes that have the recipe tag and the like tag, making sure my favorite recipes are easy for me to find without having to hunt through multiple folders for them. Creating a tag is easy to do. Come into any note, and you can really put a tag anywhere in the note, but I prefer to put them down at the bottom so that they aren't getting in the way. Come down to the bottom of that note, and hit on your number button, and your symbol button and grab yourself a hashtag. From here, up above your keyboard, you're gonna

9:13 see suggestions of tags that Apple thinks relate to this particular note. If you find the one you want, click it, just like this. And it will add that tag into the note. But, if you can't find the one you want, you can create one by going into your tag here and just starting to type. In this case, I'm going to call this a client tag. When you click the return button, that tag goes yellow and it means that it's live. Now, if I click the back arrow here and go into my folders list, we'll see my new client tag right there. And if I click on it, it will immediately show me any notes with that tag on them. But there's other ways that you can tag a note. For example, you can click the three dots in the upper right corner, click select notes, choose multiple notes, and then by clicking on

10:00 the tags button in the bottom middle, you can tag all of those notes simultaneously with any of your existing tags. Once you start creating some basic tags, it can make it really easy for you to find that specific note. But again, don't create a thousand tags, or you will get more cluttered and more disorganized. Keep them simple and intentional. For example, I've got notes all over my notes program that connect to Julie. Rather than having them all in a Julie folder because some of them are recipes and some of them are poems and some of them are house related things or other stuff, I've given them the Julie tag. Now, when I click on the Julie tag, it shows all of them right here, whether they're gift lists or poems, or things we need to talk about, or even to do lists.

10:45 Coming up to the top, I can add additional tags in. So in addition to this being a Julie tag, I want to find the important Julie tags. And there are the two important Julie tags, front and center. Tags are a super helpful way to sort and organize notes that could be scattered across multiple folders without making you crazy. Which brings us to the next tip. Smart folders. I get the question a lot. What is a smart folder versus a regular folder? We've created some regular folders by clicking the new folder button in the lower left hand corner. When you create a regular folder, you have to move notes into it. They won't automatically go there. They only go because you move them. This means you're in control. In addition, when you move a note into a folder, it

11:30 actually moves it there and it removes it from our unsorted notes folder. Let's do it right here. If I click on this Kurt Simon website, and I move it into my examples folder, it disappears from notes. But smart folders are different. in multiple ways. First of all, you don't put notes into a smart folder. You create a smart folder with rules that automatically finds notes for you, but it doesn't move them from their existing location, which means it won't remove them from the unsorted notes folder. And I use the unsorted notes folder to keep things organized. That's not super helpful. But Smart Folders can be useful for a number of reasons. Let's create one by clicking on the New Folder button in the lower left hand corner and clicking where it says Make into a Smart Folder.

12:17 When you create that Smart Folder, it'll give you a ton of different options to help the Smart Folder find the notes that you want to put into it. You can set it up to grab notes with specific tags. For example, if I come here and click All Selected Tags and then choose Julie and Important, it will automatically find the important Julie notes. and keep them in that folder and it will update them in real time. So if I tag something else with Julie and important, it will automatically move over there. You can also choose when the note was created. Was it today, yesterday, in the last three months? Or by going to the custom section, you can even pick a range. This is really helpful when you want to clean out some really old notes coming into notes that were either. created a couple of years ago or edited a couple

13:03 of years ago will help you find the notes that are probably not that important anymore and make it easy to get rid of and clean up those old notes. Down here you can even choose whether notes that are shared show up in the smart folder, whether mentions show up in this folder. This means that if you want to find all of the notes where you are mentioned across all of the shared documents you've got, you can click the me section and it will specifically find them. You can also choose whether it's got checklists , or quick notes, or pin notes, or all sorts of tools. So by going through these different options, you can create a smart folder that automates the process of finding Incompleted, Checklists, To dos, or finding the notes that someone has mentioned you on or that you've pinned. It's an easy way to collect all of those notes

13:49 together without actually having to do the work. Once you've set up the criteria for your Smart Folder, click the Done button in the upper right hand corner to create it. And now we've got a new Smart Folder with all of the notes where I mentioned. Smart folders are a phenomenal tool and they're really powerful, but Yeah, you guessed it. Don't overuse them. Don't create 50 or 60 smart folders. I would rather have more folders than smart folders. I use smart folders for specific projects and specific intentions. For example, the things that are mentioning me. or the checklists that are uncompleted. But I'm not going to use a smart folder to organize all of my separate YouTube videos. It's just going to be overwhelming and it's not

14:34 going to move them out of the unsorted notes folder. So while smart folders are important, regular folders are a little more important and are going to help you stay organized . And this next tip is super powerful. It's called Consolidation. Sometimes you've created multiple notes that are really on the same topic and probably should be one note instead of six. In this example, you'll see that I've created a bunch of different quotes. Here's one. Here's another one and another one and another one. Why are they separate? Well, because when I wrote them down, I put them in separately. But realistically, I would love to just have one note called Quotes with all of these notes inside of it. Let's go ahead and do that now. I'm going to click on the top one and

15:20 we're just going to change it from being called Quote to Quotes. Now, let's go grab the loose notes and put them in here. We're going to come into this note. and we're going to press and hold and click select all. Even if you've got a title that may be redundant, it's better to select everything from this note because then when you cut it, the Notes app will automatically remove that note so that you don't need to delete it yourself. This means that you can now come in to your quotes note, paste it down, and then move on to the next one press and hold, select all, cut, come back over to our top one here, come in, paste it, and rinse and repeat. Once you've done that you're going to eliminate all of these loose notes that really should

16:07 be part of one note.. Consolidation isn't just about the notes though. Once you've consolidated the notes, the next step is to come into your folders section and see if you have folders that should also be consolidated. For example, here I've got a folder called Julie2 with one thing in it, and then down here I've got another Julie folder with 21 things in it. I don't need both folders. So by coming into the Julie2 folder, pressing and holding on this note, Or clicking the three dots and clicking select and move all, I can take all of those notes and pop them into the other folder, which will allow me to come in and remove this folder all together. Having multiple folders that serve the same purpose, is the same problem as having

16:54 multiple notes that serve the same purpose. You want to make sure that you're keeping yourself cleaned and organized without too many folders, without too many notes, and without too many scattered documents and pieces of information that really need to be consolidated and put together. And don't forget that you can always search for any specific note by coming up to the top of the notes program and just clicking inside of that search field. It'll find all of the notes that fit that search and it will even tell you what folder they're in. For example, this story idea note is in personal. Well, this here's what to make note is inside of recipes, but sometimes, especially if you've got one of these notes that has lots and lots and lots of information in it, you need to search for something within the note itself. To do that, come on back to our three dots

17:40 in the upper right hand corner and go to where it says find in note. Instead of searching the entire notes library, it's only going to find things. that are in this specific note. And as you continue to type, it will locate them and tell you how many places in this note it's found that piece of information. So here we typed in the word info, we found it once. But what if I type in the word the? Now I found four of them. By using the arrows on the right side, I can scroll through the different selections where it found that word. Here's the first one, the second one, the third one. and the fourth one. This can make it really easy for you to find something within a note. Now, we've talked about a ton of great tools here, like folders and pin notes, tags, smart folders, searching and consolidating.

18:25 But there's still something we haven't covered. If you got great value out of this lesson, give it a thumbs up. That makes it easy for other people to find it and also get great value. And while you're down there hitting that thumbs up, pop into the comments section. Say hello, ask me a question, ask for clarification. I love to hear from you guys and I always respond to your comments. And if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, you're making things really hard for yourself. By subscribing to my channel, you're going to make it easy because these great tips and information about your Apple products will go directly into your inbox and be simple for you to locate. Now, let's get into that Power Tip. This power tip is called Make It Stand Out.

19:12 We've done great work with folders and tags and pinning things, but it can still be hard to find that specific note when you're looking for it. And there's a couple of great tips that can make it easier. To start with, We're going to come into this note right here. This is the note that I use to organize all of my YouTube videos and scripts. I need it front and center. And yes, I should pin it, but in addition to pinning it, I need it to be more visual. One of my favorite tips is coming into the title and adding an emoji. Click your emoji button in the lower left hand corner here, and you can pick any one of your emojis to identify this specific note. For this one, I really like the TV screen. So I'm going to click that. and click done. And look at how much easier it is to find that note now. It stands out.

19:58 Don't add emojis on every note, but add them for the ones that you're needing the most so that you can find them quickly . But that's not the only tool that will make a note stand out. In addition to adding the emojis, you can also add a photograph. Even if the photo doesn't relate to this note, it will make it pop and make it easier to see. Let's click our attachment button down here. Click on Choose Photo. Let's grab this photo right here. Clicking the add button in the right hand corner adds that into this note. Now, it's almost impossible for me to overlook that note inside of this list because between the emoji and the photo it just stands out. And make it stand out doesn't just apply to notes, it also applies to your folders.

20:43 Especially if you have more and more and more folders, making the folders stand out makes it easier to find it. Amongst the list of all the other folders you've created. It's easy to do by pressing and holding on any folder and choosing where it says Rename. From here, position your cursor on the far left side, click your emoji button, and find an emoji That's going to make that folder stand out too, And now my work folder pops and is easy to see amongst the list of all of the other folders that I've got. So that's what we've got for today's video, all about how to organize and sort your notes program to kill that clutter. But you don't have to stop here. There's tons more information for you to get. Check out this video over here to learn even more

21:29 about how to get organized and be productive with your Apple products. I'm Dylan Stewart and I will see you in the comments.