How (and why) I use Apple Notes

apple notes is pretty cool did you know that you can lock notes and then unlock them with your face or with your fingerprint did you know that you can scan documents directly from your phone to your computer and have the text be searchable did you know that you can create template notes for notes that you might use often you can do all of those things with apple notes and a lot more so in this video i'll show you how i use apple notes now in case you're new my name is peter i'm a youtuber podcaster productivity teacher productivity coach so i have lots of reasons to take notes i want to show you the structure of my apple notes i want to tell you some of the use cases that i have for apple notes and show you some of those i want to tell you why i chose apple notes and not some other notes app and i want to show you what i do not use apple notes for because it is not amazing at everything let's go over here in my apple notes and i'll tell you a little bit about the structure that i have going on now in apple notes you can organize your notes by folders or by tags i do both so i've got my main folders here i've got my notes folder coaching folder demo folder and subs folder i also have these tags over here now i have several folders because while most of my notes are in my notes folder there are some things that i want to keep private and i also want to keep demonstration notes outside of my notes folder so for example i have coaching clients and so inside this coaching folder there's a subfolder for each coaching client that i have but i don't want to reveal their names to you because that's private information so i just put that in here so that when i'm making videos or if i hand my phone to someone else and my notes app is open they don't see the names of my coaching clients so that's a really handy way to organize your notes at a very high level but an even handier way is to use tags for example all my tags related to toastmasters a public speaking club that i'm a member of have the tag toastmasters so how does that work um it just works by putting a toastmasters tag at the bottom of my note same thing with if i want to do a youtube um note so i have a note right here that is about this office slash youtube studio that i'm working on and i save some inspiration and some ideas that i have for how to make this a great office on youtube studio and at the bottom i just put the tag youtube now you'll see that i also added the tag home and so in this case this note shows up both under the youtube tag list and under the home tag list which is really handy you can combine these you can say what are all my notes that are about my home and about youtube and you'll see that this is the only one that actually shows up now if you want you can make a smart folder if you click new folder and you click smart folder a smart folder is a folder that is based on one or more tags so for example i want to see all my home and youtube notes then i can say show notes that have the tags home and youtube click ok and you'll see the smart folder right here which is represented by a gear icon rather than the folder icon it shows all these notes and it's a smart folder because it will populate itself based on which notes have those tags rather than you having to drag notes directly into this folder or manually into this folder now one quick thing you see these numbers on the right over here it's supposed to represent how many notes sit inside each folder but it's only the number of notes that sit directly in the folder but not in any of its subfolders so for example in the demo folder over here i've got one note inside the demo folder directly but i've also got two subfolders that each have an item in them so you would expect this number to say three but it says one so that's just something to pay attention to this is the case for my demo folder but also my subs folder which has several sub folders i don't have that many meetings but when i do have a meeting it is often a meeting with a coaching client of mine and i do like to prepare for those meetings and take notes during those meetings and reflect afterwards on what was said or just write down some notes of things that i remember that i didn't get around to during the call so i love to use apple notes for that and one way i do that is with a template so you might have seen this template tag here before i create template notes for things i might want to use repeatedly for example i have a regular coaching call template and it just looks like this whenever i'm about to have a new coaching call i duplicate it and i remove the template tag from the next one and now i just have this note over here and i just start writing okay what is the general plan that this coaching client and i are working on what is the specific agenda for today during the call i'll list some call notes and then afterwards i'll have to do is for my coaching clients such as schedule the next coaching call send me a list of your goals send me a screenshot of your weekly schedule and so on and so forth and it's super handy to have these template notes so i don't keep having to create this structure every single time another example of a template that i use is the template for a podcast recording so when i'm recording a podcast episode there's a bunch of things that i like to do i like to have a little icebreaker in case my guest and i are not very familiar with each other yet or haven't met before there's a couple things i like to explain before we record i like to do some research and come up with a list of conversation topics or potential questions and write those down and so rather than having to rewrite this from scratch every time i just duplicate the note for each episode another thing i like to use apple notes for is to save inspiration so that's what i've got going on here with this note about my home office youtube studio i've just got some ideas of things that i want to do and i also saved some photos of things that i think look cool for example a youtube background that i a youtuber's background that i think looks cool or a streaming setup that i think looks really cool or you know a light setup and stuff like that also a previous video that i did in my old apartment i thought the environment looked pretty cool so i put that in here as well so saving things for inspiration is a great use case for apple notes as well so why do i use apple notes and not another notes app for example in the past i've used the notes app bear but for at least the past few months i've been using apple notes and i'm really really happy with it and a good reason for that is that apple notes has gotten a lot of amazing updates recently and can now do lots of cool stuff there is the tag support which i mentioned earlier which is really really handy for organizing but there are also some other cool features and let's do a little live demo here's a feature that you may not be aware of i think it's really cool i received this piece of mail it's an invitation from the college that i went to swarthmore college and they're like hey do you want to show up at the reunion this year on the college campus so this is a p this is a piece of physical mail and i just want to recycle it but i do want to keep the information so what am i going to do i have a new note here right on my mac okay but i'm actually going to click this icon over here photos and see how it says my phone and my ipad so i can make it do things on my phone and my ipad so i'm actually going to say scan document now i'm going to grab my iphone see what shows up on my iphone it's a little scanning thing so i'm actually going to put that over the document there we go and now the document has been scanned i press save and see it instantly shows up over here inside my apple notes on my mac which i think is amazing just going to open this up i'm going to rotate it there we go this is the invitation now i can chuck this one away into the recycling bin but also look at this apple notes already recognized all the text in here isn't this cool i can copy paste this and send it to a friend who hasn't received this physical invitation yet i can also search if i hit the keyboard shortcut command option f it pops open the search box over here if i type reunion it actually pops up this thing now i've got a recently deleted note because i was practicing this before the with this video so that's why it shows up twice but you'll see that one isn't recently deleted and the other one is in notes it's really really cool to do it this way for scanning documents i used to use a different app an app called genius scan which is nice it works really well it's just not necessary anymore now that apple notes is so good at it and the nice thing is it keeps all my scan things in one place and together with all my other notes a really cool feature about apple notes is that you can lock notes for privacy for example i've got a note right here that has a number that is a tax number that i sometimes have to enter into websites to make sure i don't pay value added tax when i don't need to i don't want you guys to know this number because it's a private number and i might be liable or susceptible to identity fraud if i have that so i lock this note now let's say you want to lock a note it's real easy you just pick a note right click and go lock note or you can sort of press the icon over there since i'm doing this on my macbook i can use touch ids it's a 14 inch 2021 macbook with touch id i just press it boom now you'll see that it says unlock but it actually put a lock on it and i can just press the button over here and now it's locked and if i click on it you cannot see what's inside if i unlock it again all i got to do is get my finger and punch it there we go we're looking at it again so i'll just remove the lock here because it's not necessary and i will lock all the other things and so if you're doing this on your phone or on your ipad you can use face id to unlock these notes now one thing that i really like is i just locked a note with an image in it and that's something that i couldn't do in the other note apps app that i was using previously which is bear you can lock notes but not ones with images in it and that was starting to get pretty annoying for me quick caveat about apple notes though let's say i assign this the home tag now you'll see that the lock button is grayed out and if i right click it there's no lock node option anymore so once you apply a tag to a note you can no longer lock it just something keep in mind i just make sure i don't use a tag for this particular note that i want to lock and you'll see that i've got some pin notes up here so this is a common feature of notes app but apple notes has it too i find it really handy for example i've got a note right here that i call quick reference just some things i refer to very often like the color for the call to action button in some of my emails it's something that i have to manually set quite a lot and so i keep it in a quick note or in a pin note at the top where i can easily get to it in the same way i have some notes on my business strategy and on my youtube channel strategy which i've locked because i want to keep that stuff to myself but i put them at the top because if i'm ever feeling demotivated or if i'm procrastinating i'm asking myself ah why am i doing this things get a little difficult i love just quickly being able to pull up those reasons for why i'm doing all this work for you guys in the first place another nice thing about apple notes is it works really well together with other apple apps and it really lets you save web pages very easily if you browse for example with safari so let's say i'm looking at an article here in safari that i want to save later i have some thoughts on or whatever all i do is click the share button and i just click notes and then i can choose to save it to a new note or to an existing note i can even search here to search for a note that i want to put it to so if i search reunion it's going to show me that reunion note that i could add to anyway and i could say this really got me questioning whether xyz when i click save if i pop back over to my notes app you'll see that it's already right there with a link to the webpage nicely included in a fancy way with a picture the final apple notes feature that i want to share with you before i tell you about some of the things that i don't use apple notes for is sharing notes and so this is really nice if i scroll down a little bit my girlfriend and i just moved into this new apartment and we want to make sure that we keep it tidy and everything and so we have some periodic home maintenance tasks now i haven't quite finished writing up this note yet but we've got some things like you know rinse the vacuum cleaner filter et cetera et cetera it's super easy all you do is press this button over here and provided that the person you want to share with is on an apple device that is a limitation you just share it with them and it will show the updates of people changing things and whatever super super convenient now there are a few things that i do not use apple notes for that i could be using apple notes for for example when i make these youtube videos in advance i often write an outline or a script and i write down some of my ideas for what the thumbnails could be and what the video titles should be etc i could write those things down in an apple note i could have a template for that in apple notes and sort of duplicate the template in the same way that i do it with my podcast recordings however i actually use notion for that and we're looking at my notion here right now that's because notion lets me do this in a kanban board style and i just find that much more convenient if i'm let's say done with recording this you know video that we're working on right now and it's moving to the editing phase i can just drag that over to editing oh whoops no i can drag that over to editing all kinds of things are going wrong and i find that much more convenient to get that visual of what is the status of my videos also notion is cross-platform so if i need to share one of these things with my video editor i can just do that without my video editor needing to be on a mac another thing that i don't use apple notes for is for storing lots of files that go together in a big project for example when i was working on my course big picture productivity you know version three in this case i store my files on my computer's drive and i organize them there i could put some of the course files inside apple notes but i find that it gets pretty messy even if you use folders even if you use tags at some point it's just easier to store files on your hard drive and hey you're probably working with files anyway that apple knows doesn't accept or can't display so for long-term storage of files including like my tax documents and whatever i tend to organize them nicely on my hard drive rather than trying to get all that in one notes app just because the additional features you get by using the finder app in this case are bit more convenient i also do not use my notes app to store articles that i might want to read later or videos that i might want to watch later i know that's a popular use case but what i found is that when i'm looking at an article and i'm thinking oh i'm totally going to read this later i'm on youtube when i'm i see a video and i'm like well i don't have time to watch it now but i'm totally gonna watch this later in reality most of the time i don't so i just kind of stopped storing those articles and one of the nice things about doing that is that your task or is that your notes app stays really really clean so for example over the years had saved thousands and thousands of articles to my notes app and then i'm searching i'm using the search bar and i search reunion because i'm looking for that file for the invitation to my college reunion maybe i would have 20 results popping up and i'd have to sift through those right because of the word reunion might have showed up in all these articles that i saved over the years so i really like not doing that and you know what it's actually kind of nice not to feel bad that you haven't read those articles yet so the final thing that i don't use apple notes for is tracking to do's it's very tempting so if i open a new note here i'm in apple notes and i can say today's to-do's right i can say okay let's make this a checklist record youtube video on apple notes go lifting in the gym book tickets to mexico for a scuba diving trip you might think this looks pretty good but this is such a rudimentary way of tracking your to-do's that in the end you're gonna forget about stuff there's no way of saying oh actually i want to do this tomorrow yeah i can make a heading tomorrow but it gets really clunky right it's hard to assign dates and say oh i really need to do this by this time it's hard to organize things into projects right it's hard to keep track of very very detailed tasks that you might want to do which a friend of mine recently described as mosquito tasks the ones that if you ignore them for too long they're going to bite you i just love that that's such a great phrase anyway for that i use my task manager this is for example what the today page of my task manager looks like right now this is things three if you're not familiar with it yet don't use apple notes for keeping track of your to-do's notes are a piece of information that's really really different from the things that you want to do if you want to be more organized when it comes to your tasks you want to make sure that you get more done you want to be using a task manager things 3 is a great choice in fact i have an entire video course on it it's called organize your life with things three check out the sales page check out the testimonials on the sales page what people have to say about that course because it's really mind-blowing and life-changing for lots of folks thanks so much for watching this video i hope you have a fantastic rest of your day and uh ciao [Music]

Channel: Peter Akkies

Views: 92,558

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Id: UouISD35cJk

Length: 15min 49sec (949 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022