Transcription
The best way to organize your Apple Notes. Let's talk about it. Welcome back to the channel.
So, today we have a fun one, organizing your Apple Notes. And a lot of people are going to say, "Well, I already know how to do that, right?" Well, I have a method for you today that I'm probably going to guarantee most people are not going to be following, but it really helps me organize all of my Apple Notes. And I'm not going to actually get into how to use Apple Notes. I assume that you, if you're watching this, you already have Apple Notes set up on your Apple computer, Mac OS, or wherever you use it on your iPhone. So, I'm going to just show you my method of actually organizing them and keeping everything really, really tidy and uh nice, really to tell you the truth. So, sit back and relax. You can there's going to be a timeline down here somewhere. You can go ahead and jump ahead if you want to see my actual method. I'm going to go through a couple things first. But without getting too much into it, let's get started.
Now, if you're using Apple devices and you're not using Apple notes, I got to ask the question, why not? All right, don't be that person like I used to be where I used to get information from all around the web and I would just email it to myself in Gmail or something and then later on I would try to find it. It was a huge mess by emailing all this information to myself. So, I actually try to use notes for everything now and it's all kept in there and I can find it perfectly with this method.
Okay, first I'm going to start by showing you my screen over here. It's going to just be easier to do that. So, if you're like most people, you have all these notes in here, right? And you have maybe I only have in this example, this is not my real account here. This is just a sample account. In this folder here, I have 19 different notes here, but you could have 1,900 notes that are just all in a list here. And people just put notes in here and they have no rhyme or reason. Of course, you can go up here to the search bar up here in the upper right hand corner and you can search for things that sometimes finds you what you want. Sometimes it doesn't, right?
Well, the first thing I like to do, and this is not what I'm going to be talking about, but this is the kind of my you don't have to do this, but I like to have a catchall note here. See it like this? Right at the top. And actually, I'll show you how to make sure it's at the top at all times in a second. But what I like to do is if if I'm going to just be grabbing notes really quickly and I don't I don't create a note for it, you know, a permanent note for it right away. What I do is let's say I'm researching something for a trip to Boston. So here's, you know, Wikidia. I go here to Boston. I go ahead and I say I want this information. I'm going to copy it and then I'm going to go back to actually that list there. Let me go ahead and shut this down. And I'm just going to paste this in here, right? And there's the information. And I have it kind of separated here. What I'll do later is I'll come back in here and I'll decide if I, you know, need this information or not. And if I need it, I'll create a note from it. I'll go ahead and, you know, create an individual note. So, I'll go ahead and copy this and then I'll go over here to this thing right here like that. I'll put like Boston info and then I'll go down here and actually do that. So, here's a note I just created. All right. And I'll get back to this later. So, that's the catch all notes. And I actually do this because every week or every month, I go back in here and I get rid of the things that are just junk and I create real notes from things that I want to save or they're useful to me and I'll actually add them to the notes later. And I actually think that's a great way of organizing it. But you don't have to do that. That's not that's not what this is all about. That's just what I do.
Um, now if you want to go ahead and make sure the catch all notes is on top all the time, you can either right-click on it over here, right there, and then you can go ahead and just click pin notes. See it right there. I think if you go ahead, actually if you go up to file too, you can also go pin note there. Click on it and it's going to make sure that this is pinned at the top. See pin notes? So anything you move around in here, this will always be at the top. So you can always just click on it first, add your information, and then worry about it later. That's what I do. That's not what you have to do. The more important things coming next.
Okay. The method that a lot of people use are obviously going to be folders. All right. And there's nothing wrong with doing folders also on top of the method I'm going to show you. Take a look at my screen over here. So over here, here's all of your cloud. So all your notes in your cloud, I have 349, but these are all folders down here that you create. And you can put individual notes into individual folders. See this? So if you add 249 + 20 + 5 + 75, it's going to basically add up to this number here. So if I want to create another folder here, you go ahead and just go to where it says all cloud. Click on the three dots there. Click new folder. It's going to open up this. And I can just go testing just like that. Testing two because I already have a testing. Just going to do this for a test. And then I can click enter. So now I have another folder here. See it created. So I can go ahead and take any of the all cloud, you know, anything that I have in the cloud and I can drag it into this folder. That's how people usually do this. You can also take this and you can take this folder, you can drag it into another folder like that and see that now I actually have this where you have kind of nested folders. See it? And you can go ahead and create nested folders just by dragging a folder into another folder.
Now the problem with that is I you know what happens to me is I start creating a million folders and it doesn't make any rhyme or reason to me. So when I'm searching for something and I drill down in the folders later, I mean there's good information in that folder, but I have other folders maybe later that I've created and and I just can't find exactly what I'm finding because I create them kind of in a peace meal. You know, whenever I need a folder, I create it and sometimes I have things that you know are associated with that folder go into it. Other times I may have it go somewhere else and it just gets away from me that way as well. So I tend not to create the folders that much and I'll show you the method that I use besides folders. I actually use tags but a very specific way.
Okay, so here's my method right here using tags. Let me just explain really quickly what tags are. And then watch this method. This works really well for me. So I set up a page like this called setup tags and icons. And it says you can set up well I'll get into that in a second, but long story short, if you want to set up a tag, and these are tags over here. So when you set up a tag and you click on something like personal, it's going to list anything that's got that tag in it right here. So you can go ahead and easily search for things by clicking on different tags. All right? And you can go ahead and click we'll get into that in a second. So, long story short, you click on the tags you want and the information comes up over here. That seems pretty easy, but what I like to do is I like to set up this page called setup tags and icons. Set these up from the very start the best you can. And then you can add more categories later, but think about this as much as you can. So, I set this page up from the very beginning and I just create all the tags that I need from the very start. Let me explain how I do this. First of all, I create, you know, top level tags and I put a one in front of them. So again, to create one of these tags, all you have to do is you have to go ahead and click pound symbol like this. And as soon as you do that, it's going to give you a list of all the tags you've set up here. But if you want to create a new tag like, you know, test, you just do that and you click enter. And that tag test would go over here and be associated with this actual file. So anytime you click on test over here, this note would come up. But we don't want to do that. What I like to do is I like to create these like number systems here. See one, two, and then three. See that? And so these are like my top level. These are my middle here and then these are my third level and I'll get into what this means. So I set this up from the very beginning and it makes sense to me. Let me actually delete that. I set up personal school work. So anything that's personal, school or work, you can click on if I have personal information, school information, work information. I can separate it right off the bat. And then over here right away I know if this is personal, I click on personal school work. See how it's set up here. And by putting the one here, and I'll show you how to do this. By putting the one in here with an emoji, it actually lists over here very easily. So you can, you know, to select one of these first and then all the twos show up over here and then all the threes. So it kind of goes in order. See that how it's all in order over here. So it doesn't get all messed up with ones and twos and threes by doing this. So if I wanted to create another one here, which I don't I usually only say the first level, keep it to around three. You basically click the pound symbol here and then you just go ahead and you what you do is you hit control command spacebar. Control command spacebar. It's going to bring up the emoji menu. And you'll see these numbers in here. There's all these different numbers. I tend to use this one, this two, and this three here. And I click on it. And uh let me just do that right now. Just like that. And uh and then you can go ahead and it puts it in there. And you can go ahead and just put whatever you want in there, any word after it, which is important to you. So that's how you put the numbers in there. And then you do twos and threes. But you set all this up. So these are your top level. And then you create categories that are actually meaningful here. Like number two, this is going to be miscellaneous stuff or or vacation stuff or tech stuff or shopping or research, but you find like about eight different secondary categories that are super meaningful to you and you put them in here. And then third are very like these are going to be very very specific ones. And I don't recommend a ton of these. These are going to be like for if you're if you're in a class or something and you want very specific notes. So let me just explain this. So here's ones, here's twos, here's and threes. So, if I wanted to find basically my notes for business class, what I would do is I would go over here to schools. See it over here, number one, schools. All right. Now, it lists all my school notes. Let's just assume I had a ton of them in here. But then I would go to two, right? And then two here, I would say my class notes. So, click on that. So, it's got both of these highlighted right here. See that? So, these are all my class notes. And then my third level down here is either history notes right here or business class notes. Actually, now I'm I've clicked both of them. See that? So, both I don't have the there's no notes with both of them. So, I have to unclick this one over here. There we go. So, now it's going to show me the business class ones here. So, if I unclick the business class, click history. It's going to just show me the history. But look at that. So, I can go ahead and drill down super easy on all of my stuff. Um, and then you can go all tags again if you want to get back to all of them over here. So, it's just called catch all. Actually, not the catch all. Let me just actually get down there. It's called right in here setup tags and icons. So, if you imagine you set up everything you want in here from the very beginning and the first level is going to separate your personal, your work, or your school. The second level is going to be as many categories as is important to you. And then the third level are going to be these little specialized things. If you really need that third level of detail, I recommend not doing a ton of it. Um, but if you put the ones, the twos, and the threes using the emojis, they'll they'll actually go over here on the left-hand bar. And you'll always know to select at least one one searching for a note. At least one one. And then you get all of the notes under that category. And then if you want to select a number two, you're going to narrow it down. And then if you select a number three, it's going to be super micro narrowed down. and you get all of the notes in there, just like I showed you for your business class or your history class, it actually works really, really well, if that makes sense. So, you know, by setting these things up like this from the very beginning, you think about it from the very beginning. You set this page up and then, you know, it's very easy.
Now, you might say, well, why that's not easy to use? Because then you got to put all these tags in. Well, it's actually really easy to use. Let me actually show you what I mean. Remember the note we created for Boston earlier? Remember, I took it out of the catch all and I put it into its own note over here. You'll notice I have no tags in here. But since I already created all the tags, let me go down here. Since I already created all the tags, all I have to do is just click on the pound symbol. And look at this. Then I can go in here and say, well, this is going to be for my trip. So this is going to be personal. So it's already in here because I already created these. So I click on personal. Then I go to pound, right? And then I say this is for vacations right there. And then I just click enter. Now I have this kind of personal vacations in here for the Boston info. And I do this on all of my notes. So now basically again, so if I go back to all of my notes over here, let me actually click on another note down here like that. But let's say I want to find again personal here, right here. And then I want to find my vacations right here. And you're going to see the Boston information is right here. Comes up. So I can go ahead and drill down like this very easily and get to the Boston information in two seconds. So it works really, really well when you actually create this from the very beginning. And you actually create that page that lists. Let me actually go back in there. So you create the page here like this from the very beginning because then that drop-down list has all of them in there including all the icons already pre-populated in there like the ones, the twos, the threes and that's the key using the ones and the twos and the threes over here because it populates them over here in order so that you can easily click on things and they're not all over the place. If you can imagine if all these ones were in different spots or if you didn't have the one there, it was just personal work in school, they would go in here all over the place and you'd have to kind of find you wouldn't even know what level one was. So in my head, I put the icons there and I know to click on level one at least and then I can go into the other ones if I need to. And it really narrows it down quickly.
Okay. And then finally, what I like to do here is I actually go over here and I actually did this last part over here called keep, delete, or review. And you don't have to do this, but I like to do this. And if you notice in here, let me go into some notes in here. So in here I have keep. See this? I mean I have school, my class, history class. I did all this stuff. I had one, two, three levels for this note. But then I also have keep in here. See that? Now over here I have games I want to try and I put in review. All right, in here for the tag. So what am I doing here? Why did I create these last three? Well, I always put these in my notes. So if I want to keep a note, I actually, you know, obviously, let's say I wanted to keep this note, I would click the pound symbol and I would select keep right there and I'll make sure that's in the note. But if I wanted to go ahead and let me just go back here. If I wanted to delete, if I maybe wanted to delete it, maybe it was probably I needed it for temporarily, but I want to delete it later, I would put delete in here. And if I want to review it, like I don't know if I want to keep it or delete it, I would put review and let's review it again. So the reason I put these in here also is let's say I know I want to clean up my notes later. I can go in here and I can say, well, these are the notes I want to keep. These are some notes that I might think about deleting here. So I'm going to click on just just nothing else but just delete. It's going to bring up some notes in here. And like I click on this one, it says how to get to Robert's house, right? And well, it's personal. It's miscellaneous stuff, but then it's delete here. So I'm like, I don't need this anymore. I I know how to get to his house now. So then I go ahead and just delete it. So keeping them, you know, making sure that the ones you want to keep have a keep designation. Delete are the ones that are very close to being deleted. And review means like I need to go back there and look at more stuff. So if I click on actually, let me go ahead. If you click on both of them, it's going to bring up both information. Always make sure you unselect this one over here and just have the review only over here. And so these are the ones I all have to review. And then if I want to actually move these to keep, I'll move them over to keep. So you don't have to do that third step because it makes it obviously a little bit longer to add each note in. But overall, trust me, it makes a huge difference because then you know exactly what notes are important to you, what notes aren't maybe that important and what notes need a little bit more information and insight. And if you're going to be using this long term, it makes a world of difference. Trust me, it's unbelievably, you know, nice to use it this way.
Okay, so we're going to wrap this up now. Again, just really quickly, the reason I use those icons, ones, twos, and threes, and I put them into the different categories like I showed you, is because you could use other, you know, other emojis in there if you want to, but then they won't be kind of an alphabetical list on the left-hand side like I showed you all in order. So, I would recommend just using those exact ones, twos, and threes I used. And never go more than three levels. And and the three and the third level always should be very very specific. The mid-level is all of your categories. And the top level is pur work, personal, work, and and school if you have those. It could just be personal and work if you don't go to school any longer. I'm not doing that right now. This is an example only. So, you get the idea. But if you're in class and you want to take care of your notes, this is a perfect way of finding everything instantly. Tell me in the comments what you think. I mean, I know folders work really well, like I said, but for some reason for me, I create folders and then I drag things in, but they don't give me the the flexibility over here of selecting multiple things at once. Um, you know what I mean? Like I can select personal and then I can select shopping. I mean, I can go through a whole bunch of different and narrow it down. And folders, you can do that, but then you have to create the individual folders. I like to do it all in advance and it just it just is easier for me. I don't know why it's different, right? So, let me know what you think. Post in the comments and we will talk to you the next one. I hope this helped a little bit. It's hard to explain. I hope it helped people out there. We'll talk to you soon. Peace.