Transcription
If I opened your notes app, would I find a calm, organized second brain or a digital junk drawer full of random thoughts, old lists, and notes you've been promising you'll deal with tomorrow for the last two years? If it's the second one, then this video was made just for you.
I am Dylan Stewart, the MacWhisperer, and today we are organizing Apple Notes, the MacWhisperer Way. Notes is the fastest app when you need to remember something, and the fastest app to turn into chaos when you don't have a system. But today, we're fixing that. Stick with me until the end from my MacWhisperer power tip, which will take everything you're going to learn today up to the next level. And if you'd like an easy way to follow along, you're in luck, hop over to the description or hit this QR code and download your free smart guide. Now there's no more time for clutter confessions. Let's roll up our sleeves and get organized.
Do you remember when you were learning how to type and they told you to put your hands on specific keys on your keyboard? They called these the home keys, and as you would put your hands there, you would be on most of the letters you would need right off the bat, and then you'd step away from the home Keys a little bit to hit the other letters, but you'd come back to the Home Keys.
In the Notes app there are home folders, which are two folders that are built in. Up at the top of your sidebar, you should see an ALL folder and a notes folder. If you don't see those, it's just because you haven't created your first folder yet. You can do that by clicking the folder button right here, and once you do, you'll see the ALL folder and the notes folder. The ALL folder might have a different name than mine does. It might say ALL Mac, or ALL Gmail or ALL Yahoo or something like that. But whichever folder starts with the word ALL and shows up at the top of your list is your ALL folder, and this folder is the one and only location where you can see 100% of your notes. No matter where they're filed. If you look down below the notes, you'll see which folder they're actually in. This is your library. Every single note is here. Whether you filed it, whether someone else shared it with you, whether you just created it a minute ago, this is your global library that makes it the right place to start and the right place to find things until you're a little better with the system. Why? Because when you don't have a system and you don't know where to put things, you guess where they should go. You start creating notes inside of random folders, which is how you end up losing notes or ending up with folders with just one note in them, or duplicating things because you couldn't figure out where you put them the first place. So here is rule number one. Capture the note first. Organize it later. Think of the ALL folder as your library. Everything starts there. So rather than coming into a folder and creating a new note from here, just live in the ALL folder and create your notes there, and then you can put them away.
And the second home folder is called the notes folder, in spite of its super innocent name it's one of the most important folders in the notes ecosystem. It should have been called the Unsorted Folder because it's where any notes that you haven't put away yet live. Any note you create is going to show up here until you move it into another folder and then it will disappear. The unsorted notes folder holds everything that doesn't have a place yet, but rather than letting it get cluttered, we're going to use it intentionally because it's going to tell us which notes are one-offs, which notes you started and didn't finish, which notes haven't been organized yet, or may just need to be thrown away? Understanding your home folders is the first piece of really getting good with notes. Create your notes inside ALL. Search for them inside ALL, and use your notes folder as a catchall where the unsorted ones go before you file them or delete them.
Knowing where to create your notes knowing where to find things is part of the battle. But the other piece comes from creating notes with intention right from the beginning. There are a few rules you need to learn to make sure you don't create chaos, instead of clarity. Let's start by creating a new note by clicking the new note button. When you create a note, the first line becomes the title. It gets a different format shown as bold and can be viewed inside of the list area here. If you don't end up putting something in the first line, you'll have something called new note, which is really going to burn you in the long run. And sometimes you'll put vague stuff in like stuff or things or, monday, these kind of unclear titles will be useless moments from now. Making it hard for you to find that note or remember what's in it without clicking on it. So start off with the title. Give it something that's going to make sense right off the bat. Be intentional. For this one let's call it Tasks for Monday. March 11th. Now it's clear what it is and what it's for, but once you've got a good title for it, you may want to make it a little more visual because when your titles are just words, it's really easy to overlook them and you've gotta scroll through your list and squint and like, what's this one and what does that mean and what's over here? But you can easily add an emoji to your title, which will help it stand out. It's not childish. It's visual indexing. I'm going to add an emoji of a checkbox. To get to your emoji toolbar, you can hold down the control and command buttons and tap the space key. You'll get your emoji toolbar and you can search for anything you're looking for, like check, and it will show me anything that matches the word check. I like the green one. Now it's easy for me to see that this is a task list. It's clear and the icon helps grab my eye so I don't have to scroll through 50 notes to find that important note.
One of the problems with notes is that we tend to throw a lot of different information into them without really thinking about it. Either we're dictating or we're copying and pasting from multiple places, or we're just typing like a fiend, and all of a sudden, instead of a clean, easy to read note, you've got a giant wall of text with no separation and no understanding of what the separate pieces of this note are all about. Feels overwhelming, and you open it up and start to scroll and sigh and just close it again. This is where formatting can become your best friend. There are four main formats that you'll use regularly inside of notes. It starts with the title format. The title format is the first line of your note, but you can add a title anywhere. When you want to change formatting, you're going to click the big a little, a formatting icon and choose one of the separate formatting sections. Here we've got it selected on title. When your cursor is on one of the formatting styles and you press return, it reverts you to the body style. The body style is smaller and it's plain text, but you don't have to start with body. You see there's another section called header and headers can be used to separate information inside of the note. If the title is the name of the note, the header is the most important pieces of the note broken down into chunks. And if you highlight any text and come up to the formatting bar, you can select heading right here, and you'll see that it's larger and bold. Again, when I press return it drops me back down into body. But we can also go to a subheader. I'm going to highlight the words, click on formatting, and come down to subheading. It's in bold, but it's just a smaller font, and when we press return again, it's going to put me back into body. Each of these formats has a slightly different style. The title being large and bold, the header being medium size and bold. The subheader being small and bold, and body just being in a standard font without bold or a large size. These are your main format settings, and they're not just to make things look pretty. They're functional and they let you organize your thinking inside of a single note.
To the left side of each of these, there's a little arrow closing, that arrow will hide anything of a lesser format underneath that section. So when I close this, the body disappears. But if I come down here and I give us a second subheader, making sure to come into the formatting bar and change it this way, when I close the first subheader, notice that the second subheader stays there, and if I close the header, it'll close the subheaders. But if I have another header underneath it, when I close the first header, it only closes to the second header, you can use this to stack your information together, and it works in each of those four levels. The title closes everything below it until it hits another title. The header closes everything below it until it hits another header, and the subheading closes everything until it hits another subheader.
How would you actually use this? Let's imagine that we're remodeling our home. We're going to start with our title. Once I've done that, I'm going to talk about each of the separate rooms that we're going to be working on. Each of these is a separate section, so I can either click on each line and come up and give it the heading style. Or I can select all of them and give all of them the heading style. But if you like to use keyboard shortcuts, there's even another way to do it. Coming up to the format menu here, you'll notice a whole list of the different keyboard shortcuts. Title is shift plus Command plus T for title, it's obvious, right? Heading is shift plus command, plus H for heading, and subheading is Shift plus Command Plus + J. You're just going to have to remember that one. And to make something body, it's shift plus command plus B. Learning these keyboard shortcuts can significantly simplify formatting this note. I'm going to now highlight all three of these and use the keyboard shortcut shift plus command, plus H to mark them all as headers. Now I'm going to come into the kitchen and give it a little bit of space and talk about some of the different kitchen pieces. Each of these is a subsection of kitchen, but there's going to be notes inside of all of them. So I'm going to take all three of these and turn them into subheaders by using command plus shift plus J. Now I can come into cabinets and I can give it additional information about what I might be looking for within the cabinet. And now let's do the same for the sink and add additional information here. And then I can continue into the tile section. And as I put each of these pieces together into their formatting sections, when I'm ready to move to the next section, all I have to do is close off the little subheadings. And now all the kitchen information is ready for me to look into without it being in front of me all the time. And if I'm ready to work on the bathroom or the bedroom, I can hit the little arrow and close all of the subheadings up. It means that instead of dumping everything into one long paragraph, you get to break it up into separate sections. Do that either by clicking next to the line. Coming up to the formatting bar and choosing here. Coming up to the menu under format, choosing here, or using your keyboard shortcuts. Or you can even right click on a line and come down to where it says paragraph styles and choose from here. Any way you do it, it makes it easy to organize a complex note without having to have everything in front of you all the time. Instead of this note being a mess, one note becomes organized. It feels calm. It feels intentional. you're not just typing and throwing information onto the page. You're building something you can actually come back to later without dreading it.
So now that we understand why we start in all notes and how to build a clean note from the beginning, let's talk about where to put your notes so you can actually find them later. Let's revisit our home folders. The all notes folder where everything lives. and the notes folder were new unsorted notes land. You should be using the ALL notes folder regularly, especially when you're searching, because you can easily find everything regardless of which folder it's actually stored inside of. And the best part of using the ALL Notes folder as your home base is that when you use the ALL Notes folder to create a new note it automatically gets put inside of the notes folder, which is ideal because it keeps everything out in the open instead of buried in some remote folder somewhere that you'll forget about. Instead, using your notes folder, you can review your new notes, delete them. Tag them or move it to the folder it belongs in at any point. It keeps you from having to organize while you're creating and capturing. The notes folder becomes an automatic simple location for you to sort out all of your stuff and delete the things that you don't need.
Now we really need to talk about folders. everybody wants to create a ton of folders. Folders for every little thing. Every little note gets its own folder. Joe's Pizza gets to have a whole pizza folder, but there's nothing else in there. And then I have this awesome restaurants folder with one note about my favorite restaurants, it's just a waste when you have too many folders, you spend more time organizing and moving between the folders than creating notes or referring back to them, which defeats the entire purpose. So I'm going to introduce a rule here that's called the rule of threes, it means this. A folder does not get to exist unless it contains at least three items. An item can be an individual note or an item can be a sub folder. If you have one note that does not deserve a folder, two notes. Still not a folder. But once you have at least three meaningful items, now we're talking something that deserves a folder. You see, I constantly see people with 42 folders and 39 of them have one lonely note sitting there like it's in timeout. We don't do that here. Folders are buckets. They're big categories, things like work. Or personal or family things that can capture all sorts of different notes, not these tiny incremental ideas like Montreal. Gee, I went to Montreal once. Why do I need a folder? Don't create a folder because you think I might need it someday. Create a folder because you already have at least three things that belong there, and once a folder starts to grow and you've got five or 10 notes in it that are covering different topics, that's when a sub folder can make sense to clean things up. But don't create folders just because you can. Make sure you've got at least three real items ready to live there before you even think about hitting this new folder button.
One of the ways that you can keep things simple is taking stuff that's in a folder and putting it into a larger category. So here I've got favorite pizza, but here I've got restaurants. I can take this note and put it into restaurants. Get rid of the favorite pizza folder altogether. If I come into my notes folder, I might even find another note that could go in the restaurant's folder, like the sushi one. Suddenly I've got three notes in the restaurant folder and it's now a real folder instead of something that's just pretending to be a folder. And the same thing can happen for stuff like my one trip to Montreal and my 10 times to New York. I can come in here, create a new folder and call it travel. Now New York can go inside of travel and then I can take Montreal and put that inside of travel as well. Now my travel folder almost has its necessary three items. It's got the note I created for Montreal, which is going to allow me to delete the Montreal folder completely, and it's got the sub folder for New York. But that's only two items. We're going to need one more. Let's take a look inside notes and see what else we find. Oh, look at that. It's about my trip to Kyoto. Let's take that, drag that into travel along with my Barcelona and my Reykjavík note. And all of a sudden my travel folder has plenty of notes inside of it. And. I've sorted some of the notes out of my notes folder and cleaned up a couple of other folders. don't just create a folder because you can create it because it's going to help you stay organized, which brings us to the next layer of the organizational ladder tags.
Let's talk about tags. They're sometimes called hashtags and you see them all over the place. They start with the pound symbol, and then a word. Hashtags can't have two words, so if there's something that needs two words, you're going to need to use a dash or an underscore. Think of tags as labels that you can stick onto a note so that it can belong to more than one category at the same time. Tags don't move the note anywhere. They just make it easier for you to find it. Tags are how you avoid guessing when a complex note could live in a couple of different folders. And tags are really easy to create. Let's come into our notes folder again and let's find our things to do note. We can come right into this note and we can create a tag. Start with the hashtag and then start typing. If you already have that tag, it's going to automatically show up and let you auto-fill it. When you're done creating the tag, press the return button and it will go live by turning yellow. You can even use emojis as tags, so I could put a hashtag here. And then bring up my emoji toolbar with control, command and space, and grab an emoji that speaks volumes, like the thumbs down tag. Once I click that, I'm going to press the return button and the hashtag goes live, and we'll see it on our list down here right at the bottom. But don't go hog wild and create hundreds and hundreds of tags. Keep it simple. Things like taxes or urgent or even archive, can help you really keep things clear and now whatever note that you tag can live in multiple logical places without having to be moved. In other words, I can put things to do in my to-do list, but I can also come into my thumbs down emoji and pull it up immediately. Folders are physical. Meaning that a note can only be in one folder at a time, but tags are relational, meaning that one note can have multiple tags. here I have a note from a business lunch that I had. This note is going to need to be in a couple of different places, so I'm going to come down to the bottom and create a hashtag first, and we're going to just call this one business. You'll notice that it doesn't autofill because I don't currently have a business hashtag. This is the first note that fits that criteria. But no problem. When I press return, now I have a business tag. Let's add to it by putting in taxes, because I want to submit this to taxes when the time comes, but not just any taxes. This needs to be my 2026 taxes. Sometimes when you do things like numbers, it may not create a tag automatically like what happened here, but no problem. You can highlight that right click on it and up at the top, convert it to a tag. It automatically avoids tags when there's numbers involved because it could be something not tag related, but now it's a tag just like any other tag. And we just need a few more tags here. So let's hashtag receipt. And lastly, hashtag the name of the client in case I need to do other stuff for that client. Now I've got all of these separate tags inside of here. If I come down to the hashtag section and I click on something like taxes, it's going to show me all of my separate taxes notes. If I come in and I tag something like 2026, it's going to show me all of those notes. But one of the best things about hashtags is the ability for you to stack them on top of each other. So I can grab taxes right here, and then add to taxes 2026 and it finds this specific note. I could continue and tag this with business. Or Mark Handers enabling me to find a note using basic criteria like hashtags. So suddenly I don't have to move things around between one folder to the next, and I don't have to guess where it is.
And if right about now you're thinking to yourself, Dylan, this is ridiculous. I have hundreds of notes. How am I going to tag all of them one at a time, coming into the bottom of each one and creating a hashtag. That's just not practical. You're right. It's not practical. There's an easier and better way to do tagging on multiple notes. For this let's come into the all iCloud folder and let's look for some notes that have to do with food. I see one here, comfort Food. I see restaurants here. I see takeout spots. Now, one of the downsides of doing this multiple tagging trick is you have to already have created the hashtag at least once. So I want to create a hashtag called food, and I can see that it already exists. Now with these three items selected, I can right click on them, come over to the tag listing, and drop them all into food just like that. I can also come into this one here. That one's actually a recipe, and that one's a recipe too. So I can grab them by clicking on one of them, holding the command button down and clicking on the other one. And now I can right click again, come into tags and drop right down to the bottom where I see recipes. Now I can find all of my food notes by clicking on hashtag food. But I can refine and filter that list by coming to where I see recipe. And now I only find food notes that have to do with recipes. If you use this trick to select multiple items inside of your ALL iCloud or inside of your notes, you can file a ton of things in just a couple of clicks. Tags are meant to help you find chunks of notes quickly, even when those notes might live in different folders. Or might not have been filed anywhere yet. It gives you a fast way to pull together all your grocery lists, all your client notes, or all your inspirational ideas without reorganizing and moving things between folders every single time. But remember, you still live in ALL notes. You don't need to bury everything.
And the next tool makes finding important notes even easier, because let's be honest, not all notes are created equal. There are some notes that you are opening constantly. The list of work projects you're deep into. The list of links you need for your website rebuild. The class outline that you're tweaking every single week. These aren't file it and forget it notes. These are active notes and that's where pinning comes in. When you pin a note, it jumps to the top of its folder and it also shows up pinned at the top of the ALL notes folder. That means you don't need to go hunting and you don't need to scroll. The important stuff is right there waiting for you. If I come into my work folder here, I know that I'm going to be working on this project for quite a while. I better put it at the top. I right click on it and choose pin notes, and it goes up to the very top of this list. But if I come into ALL iCloud, it's also at the top of that list. That means no matter what folder something is in a pin note is at the top of the ALL list. But you want to be careful because if you pin everything, you might as well pin nothing, keep it to about 10 pin notes at a time. For me, there's certain things that I do on a regular basis, like my things to do list. I can right click on it and pin it, or I can also swipe from the left to the right, to pin it. pinning notes makes it simple to find them quickly. No matter what the note is if you're accessing it frequently, swipe from the left to the right or right click on it and choose pin, and instantly it lives up the top forever.
Now that you've learned the power of starting your notes with a clear and intentional system, there's just one more thing that we need to talk about before I drop my power tip. If this video already shifted how you think about your notes app. Then go ahead and click that thumbs up button. It makes it so much easier for other people to find this video, and it lets me know you'd like more content just like this. And if you've got a question, a comment, something you want to know more about, drop it in the comments section. I absolutely love to hear from you guys. And if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, that's like having Apple Notes and choosing to drown in Microsoft Word documents instead. Oh, don't do that. Hit that subscribe button instead, tap the notify bell and let's make sure your technology works for you instead of the other way around. Well, that's enough scribbling in the margins. Let's flip the page and reveal the power tip.
Now that you've got a system and you understand how all the pieces fit together, everything becomes easier from the moment you create a note to the moment you need to find it inside of a folder or inside of your ALL notes folder. But sometimes the real challenge isn't one note. It's a group of notes that all belong together. For example, I have all of these separate restaurant information notes and ideas, but it's a little hard to jump from one note to the next on a regular basis. So instead of doing that, we can create a master table of contents note. Let's start off by creating a new note, and we'll call this my Master restaurant list. This is helpful because sometimes I've got a lot of details about a specific restaurant or restaurants I want to try, or a place I keep recommending, and rather than jumping from one note to the next, what if I put them all together into a single note. It's easy to do by linking notes together. And here's how you do that. Start off inside the note you want to use as your master note, come onto your keyboard and hit the greater than symbol twice. You're going to see a list of all the most recent notes that you've created. If you see the one you want, you can just use your mouse and click on it, hit return, come down to the next line. Greater than greater than. Find the next one. If you don't see it, you can start typing it in. When you find the one that fits, click on it or press return and you'll get it added right there. Let's do it one more time. This time I'm going to use the arrow key to move down the list until I find the one that I really want. The takeout spots near the house, pressing return, it selects and it links that. But there's one more step to this process because what we've done now is we've linked notes to this master list. If I click on one of these notes, it pops me to that specific note. But what happens when I want to come back to the master list? Well, that's where we link back to that master's list. Greater than, greater than, and it's right up at the top here. Clicking on it gives me a link that jumps me back to the master list. Now I can head into my Joe's Pizza note. Come right into it. greater than, greater than, tag it onto the master restaurant list. Come back, come into my takeout spots, right down to the bottom here. Greater than, greater than master restaurant list. And now I've got a table of contents that can live in one place like my restaurant's folder and give me access to tons of other notes without having to dance around trying to find them. You can even do it with a travel note, creating a travel dashboard, linking your packing list and your flight details and your hotel information, your itinerary. One note that leads to everything. And then suddenly you don't have 23 notes to search through. You have one simple master note that leads to everything. That's how you avoid folder sprawl. That's how you think intentionally, and that's how you build a brain that you can trust.
So here's the big picture. Start in ALL notes. Create your notes there. Use the notes folder as a sorting bin. Follow the rule of threes. Use tags to find what you're looking for, and pin the things that matter most so they're always up at the top. And build yourself table of content notes that act as dashboards instead of a billion tiny folders. Simple, clean. Sustainable. If you haven't grabbed your smart guide yet, this is a great time to do that by hitting this QR code or hopping over to the description section. I hope you learned a ton today, but remember, there's always more to learn. Check out this video over here for even more amazing tips and tricks about getting the most out of your Apple products. I'm Dylan Stewart, the MacWhisperer, and I'll see you next time.