Member-only story
What Nobody Says About Organizing Your Notes
Stop sorting your notes. Start asking them.
How I wrote this: the ideas, stories, and words are mine. AI helped me edit the English and tighten the structure, the way an editor would.
I’m at the café. I have ten minutes to relax before starting my work as a technical writer. The waiter has just brought me a coffee and a pistachio brioche.
I open Apple Notes. In the last month, I’ve written 155 notes on what I read, the YouTube videos I watched, and the conversations I had with colleagues.
Once, I would have tried to fit all these notes into the taxonomy of my knowledge system. I would have spent hours trying to extract future value from them. I would have invested a lot of time for a minimal return, often none.
Now, everything has changed.
Organizing sends you back to zero
Once, I would have assigned at least one tag to each note, picking it from my taxonomy. Along with the tag, I would have edited the note and its title to give them a shape I’d still understand later.
I would soon have discovered that new notes need new tags. New information necessarily changes the taxonomy, precisely because it’s new.
