How to organise Apple Notes

hello my name is Paul miners welcome back to another one of my productivity training videos in this video I want to share some tips on how to organize Apple notes I've made a few videos on Apple notes in the past I'll link up here a video I made a little while ago about how I use Apple notes and how I've gone paperless using Apple notes but one of the questions that I often get and it's probably the biggest question you need to answer when you first get started using Apple notes is how do I organize all of my notes there are a few tools like folders tags and smart folders that we can use to organize our Apple nodes and of course it goes without saying I'm just sharing kind of the system that works for me but really you can organize Apple notes however you like I'm just going to share kind of my thought process behind when to use notebooks versus tags and that kind of thing if you have any questions feel free to leave me a comment below and without further Ado let's get into the video so as I mentioned before there are kind of two main tools we can use to organize our notes there are folders which you can see here on my sidebar and then we have tags and sometimes it's hard to decide should I use a folder or should I use a tag so the way I think about them is folders should be used for the broad sort of categories or different areas of your life that you need to manage or another way that you can think about using folders is as a replacement for actual notebooks I'm not a big user of physical notebooks these days I've got a video about how I've actually gone paperless using Apple notes but some people use notebooks for different things like maybe studying work personal and if you're that kind of person trying to go digital that's a way that you could think about using these folders now if you're like me if you're an Apple user using Apple notes on the Mac on the iPhone or the iPad you probably have an iCloud account and so you like me will see an iCloud kind of folder or section here on your sidebar so these are all of the folders and notes in my iCloud account now I can if I go to notes and then accounts up here this is going to open the settings on my Mac I can choose to also sync notes from other internet accounts like I have this work Google mail account and you can see I've actually chosen to disable notes so I'm syncing my email my contacts my calendars with my Mac but notes I've chosen not to sync because I just keep all of my notes in my iCloud account anyway I don't want the extra kind of options there so I've disabled that but if you want you can connect you know multiple Google or an iCloud account or a Microsoft account and you'll be able to see that here in your sidebar as well now I should point out that with my iCloud account connected there are a couple of default notebooks that you'll see there is this all iCloud folder we can't rename or delete or change that in any way this is just there by Design and it shows all of the notes in this iCloud account regardless of what notebook or sorry folder they're in and then we have the notes folder this acts as sort of like the default folder and again I can't rename or delete this all of my other notebooks I can right click and I can delete rename them but the this notes one here this is kind of fixed and so this behaves as the default so if I create a new note you'll see it automatically goes into that notes folder and in my case you'll see I don't have a lot in here I use this notes folder almost as a temporary folder where I'm I've got new notes that I've recently started but my my objective then is I will then sort these notes into one of my other folders so I can right click and I can move it to one of the folders that I've already set up or if I don't need a note anymore I can just delete it to create my own folders I can either go to file and then new folder up here or I can click the new folder button down here and give it a name and then click OK and it's going to be added to my sidebar and I can just drag and drop this to wherever I want to position it I can also choose to Nest this folder within another folder by dragging it on top of another folder and then letting go and you can see it kind of creates this folder hierarchy where I have sort of a parent and then a child folder I haven't really taken advantage of this yet I'm pretty happy with my folder structure which is quite minimal as well but if you are going to create more folders you can Nest them like this to keep things a bit more organized and then adding notes to that folder is really easy I can either right click and go move to the new folder or I can simply drag and drop it into the folder so funny story I was halfway through recording this video and I stopped to have some lunch and go for a walk and I got rained on so I'm gonna go change now but that's why I look different for the second half of this video okay I'm back and I was just finishing off talking about folders and so in summary I recommend using folders for the main categories areas of responsibility that you have or as a replacement for those physical notebooks so now let's talk about tags and how I think about using tags is for the more granular sort of topics or kind of labels that you might want to apply to a note and the important thing with tags is that I can put a tag on a note across any note regardless of what folder it's in so for example I have this tag called instruction manual which I use to group together notes for the paper instruction manuals that I have thrown away so in this case you know here's the manual for our heat pump and I either take a picture of the manual or I'll try and find a downloadable PDF and so some of these some of these notes are in my personal folder some are in the reference folder some might be in the business or property folder it doesn't matter where I put the note it doesn't matter what folder that note lives in I can apply the tag and I can see all of the notes with that tag in one place to create a new tag I simply need to add the pound sign and then the name of my tag anywhere in my node so if I type the pound you'll actually see It'll suggest some tags that I can add or to create a new one I can just write the name of that tag and hit return and you can see it will turn yellow and that means the tag has been created and I can now see that here on my sidebar I also think tags are quite useful in examples like this where I have this CrossFit tag for tagging notes related to you know here's some physio exercises that I need to do and I don't want to create a whole folder for CrossFit you know I've only got a few nodes here that's like less than 10 but I can use a tag to group together all of my CrossFit notes for exercises and competitions and programs that we're doing without having to create this entirely new folder earlier on in the video I gave the advice which was to not go crazy or overboard with the number of folders that you create because it can get difficult working out where to put things but with tags I think it's okay to create more as you need them as I mentioned it's quite good to use a tag if you can't really justify creating an entire folder because you only have a couple of notes so you can just create that tag and you can group together those kind of similar notes in one place and they're easy to find later so our folders here and tags here are kind of the main ways that we can organize and create structure within our notes now I also want to touch on Smart folders so up here if I go to file and then new smart folder I can create a new folder but it's smart by which I mean notes will automatically appear in this folder if they meet certain criteria so let's create a smart folder called recent recipes and down here I can specify the criteria that I'm looking for and whether I want this smart folder to make sure the notes contain all of the following or any of the following criteria so I'm going to say I'm looking for notes where the tags are recipe and where the date created is in the last 12 months so let's go ahead and create that so here's my smart folder on the sidebar now it's got this slightly different icon and I can see my notes with the recipe tag that were created in the last 12 months and I should point out that this note still lives in you can see here the personal folder but I also see it in the smart folder so a smart folder is slightly different to the normal folders I think of them more as like saved searches or filters that show us the notes from other folders and locations that meet certain criteria personally I'm not using smart folders at the moment not because I don't think it's a good feature I just don't really have a requirement for any I'm quite happy with the folder structure that I currently have now a couple of other tips I want to point out when it comes to organizing your folders is you can change how a folder is sorted so if I show you this reference folder here and if I go to view you can see I can sort the folder by default it'll sort by when the note was edited you can see in this case I've actually chosen to sort all notes in this folder by when they work created instead whereas other folders of mine like this journal folder I've sorted by title because I use the title as a way of saying what day I'm journaling on now I could have chosen sorted by date created could also work but in this case I've actually with my journal I've actually gone back in time and I've created journal entries and put in photos of different significant moments and things and so the Day created doesn't always match up with the actual Journal date so that's why I've used the title option here but the key takeaway here is that you can sort your folders by title date created edited depending on kind of what's most useful for that particular folder another quick organization tip is that I can right click on a note and pin the note or if I swipe with my mouse sideways I can pin a note like this this is a really useful way of putting notes to the top of a folder or in this case I'm just in my all iCloud folder so useful for notes that I need to refer to or that I'm updating on a regular basis and just being able to get quick access to them and so that is a look at how to organize Apple notes as you can see it's actually pretty simple I think a lot of people have a tendency to overthink their structure they're sort of looking for a big elaborate way of organizing their folders and their tags and coming up with this amazing system but as you can see see I think just by using the folders for the main categories of your work and the things that you're doing tags for the sort of more granular topics and labels that you want to apply actually helps you to organize things pretty easily without too much effort if you have any questions feel free to leave me a comment below thank you very much for watching see you in 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Channel: MinorCo

Views: 123,233

Keywords: How to organise Apple Notes, how to use apple notes, apple notes, apple notes tutorial, apple notes app, apple notes tips, apple notes tips and tricks, how to use apple notes on iphone, get more out of apple notes, apple notes tutorial iphone, how to use apple notes app, how to use apple notes on ipad, how to organise apple notes, apple notes 2021, apple notes ipad pro, apple notes app tutorial, how to organize notes in apple notes, apple notes tutorial ipad

Id: 56Abs-8OzzE

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023