By now, you might already know about the problem of 2 Worlds and dealing with tons of digital content. You might also have an overview of the approach to handling it.
In this article, I will cover more about how to organize the information flow within the note-taking application. In my case, I’ll be working with Apple Notes. Due to its simplicity, you will reproduce the approach easily in any other application.
So, during the day you deal with tons of different pieces of information coming from all kinds of sources. If you work in an organization, especially in some manager roles, the amount of information and incoming requests might be overwhelming. So the main principle of the approach I stick to is to spend the least amount of time possible deciding what to store and where. The goal is to offload it at a later, presumably more convenient time.
Consequently, I gotta have a very clear, effortless, and repeatable way to populate my tool of choice and store the content.
By following ITIL and ITSM principles, I’ve got to streamline and operationalize my daily routines through a single point of entry. This will allow me to become almost automatic at certain activities to avoid spending hours for nothing.
There are several ways to do this, and one of them is absolutely incorrect 🙂
- Wrong way: create a folder structure in your NOTES app and try to create notes right in the corresponding folders during the day. For example, you have one folder for travel stuff, one for interesting articles, and another for legal documents. During the day, when you come across travel-related info, you put it directly into the Travel folder; Legal docs go to the Legal folder immediately, etc. This is wrong!
- Possible way: create an Inbox folder in your Notes and put all the incoming information into it as separate notes during the day. Sort notes later into appropriate folders. Good, possible, but we can do better.
- Best way: create a new Daily Note every day and populate it with content throughout the day using Apple’s Quick Note functionality. Sort it out during the evening routine (covered later in this article).
Why #3 is the best one?
- First and foremost, it allows me to defer thinking, deciding, and sorting the information for later.
- The routine of populating content is repeatable and unified across all Apple devices. You have Quick Note functionality, that behaves in the same way and is equally accessible on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. As a result, you get closer to automating your routine actions and spend no time remembering how exactly to do this.
- Brand new Daily Note created every day is a canvas for all my thoughts and ideas throughout the day. It helps to avoid cluttering, which would have taken place if I had one single place or note open for eternity (like the way #2 above suggests).
- Previous point also unveils one interesting fact — by starting your day with Daily Note you basically start from scratch, no backlog is transferred. By this move alone you filter out a lot of irrelevant stuff from the previous day.
I strongly recommend going with Daily Notes because of its advantages. It will save you a lot of time and stress daily. It will make it super easy to juggle various types of information coming at you during the day while being very flexible to have some chronological aspects covered as well.
You can take a look at my actual Quick Notes / Daily Notes setup in my Apple Notes after a couple of months in this article.
A lot of my Daily Notes content is populated automatically via the Apple Shortcuts. Every morning special automation that I have created scans my calendar events and open tasks and neatly reflects them in my Daily Note for today. I’ll cover this automation in a separate article.
This is just an example – in the real world you may also want to have your Daily Goals reflected here, errands, have separate section “insights” or “journalling”, etc, etc. But once this canvas is configured, it becomes a useful starting point to deal with whatever content possible throughout the day.
In this example under Notes for Today section, I put all my meeting notes, incoming files, actions, drafts, ideas, sketches, flows, and schemes during my day. Later in the evening, I follow a certain routine to get rid of the irrelevant content and sort the rest of the stuff where it’s supposed to be.
What I find really amazing about the Quick Notes is that they behave in a very special way and provide some unique functionality across Apple ecosystem. That other applications cannot match even theoretically.
For supported applications, as well as anywhere on the Web, you may add links to corresponding pages or even application screens (like in the example above) right in this popup Quick Note window. And what happens next is that this little quick note window will popup every time you visit this place next time.
This is especially useful for Daily Notes, because if you go this way, Daily Note will be the only popup window ready to receive your any input during the whole day, allowing you to streamline your content population process.
2 Ways to create Daily Notes in Apple Notes
Manual Way:
- Create a folder Daily Notes, where you will store all your Daily Notes
- Every morning create a note, title it with Today’s date
- Move this new note to the Quick Note section of Apple Notes
Also, I make sure to configure Apple Notes to continue the existing Quick Note, instead of creating a new one each time.
Automated Way:
- Create a folder Daily Notes, where you will store all your Daily Notes
- Create a Shortcut that will automatically create a daily note in 1 click. Optionally, on this step you can add any other useful information that you would like to see appended to the newly created note automatically (like weather, calendar, etc)
- Automate this Routine via Automation. For example, I may want to run this shortcut every morning at 9 am.
- Every morning I move newly created Daily Note to Quick Notes, to ensure it is available in one single click or swipe across my devices.
Unfortunately, at present moment, Apple Shortcuts do not have the ability to move notes to Quick Notes folder automatically. So this will always be a manual step 🙁
What else can you use Daily Notes for
One of the useful things about Daily Notes is that they stay there in the Daily Notes folder as historical reference points. And all of them are perfectly “searchable”. Whatever you have put there, will stay there and you will be able to find it. You can always “get back in time” and see what happened on some particular date. That said, the list of activities Daily Notes might be useful for is quite interesting:
- Canvas for ideas, random notes, and pure creativity
- Daily Goals
- Insights
- Journalling
- Mood tracking
- Weather tracking
- Place for drafts
- Brainstorming
- A “Limbo” for items that are hard to categorize
At the end of the day, you may see that some information might be hard to categorize, but at the same time, it may be quite useful to throw it out in the trash. So Daily Notes can be a good place to leave such items as they are.
It doesn’t matter which application you are using — this routine is almost certainly possible to adopt and configure anywhere. Some applications like Craft or NotePlan already have this functionality built-in, and they provide it in a very thoughtful way. I highly recommend checking these apps out if you’d like to structure your flow based on the Daily Notes extensively.