Having fallen into a Twitter and Instagram rabbit hole for the last few years, I've been re-inspired to write more after following people's blogs and writing using RSS (last used when Google Reader was a thing), and now much prefer using FeedBin to anything where an algorithm decides what I read (easily enough for another blog post!). If I'd written a new blog post for every time I'd edited/change my CMS, I'd have a few thousand posts by now. I'm a tinkerer and love playing with things. I could also separate all my personal (read: household related things) and work admin and work projects into separate sections, all of which I needed to focus on their own. OK - so far so good - this would help tame the mess of hashtags and bring some structure to things, moving current projects to the fore, and pushing things I still wanted to the back. Cold was more long term thinking - not actionable right now, but something you would want to think about months or years from now, tangential to your current focus.think of what you might have on your desk right this moment. Hot being current drafts, projects, and outlines, all currently actionable.Perell believes in dividing notebooks up into hot and cold: I was able to select the few key ideas that might help, and combine them with some others. It's essentially a lead magnet for his online writing course which looks excellent and chock full of nuggets of advice in itself. I'd recently had a video shared with me How to write online with David Perell, which I'd already watched and taken notes from, with an eye for improving my writing. So how could Bear help make sense of all these things? I realised I needed a system if I was to make the most of things, and get better at writing, and move my chaotic maelstrom of notes into a calmer order. Have ideas out on a dog walk or queuing in supermarket - fleeting note-taking in-the-moment.īringing order to chaos - establishing a structure.I also wanted something that I could draft longer-form things in.I watch and read a lot, and I wanted an easy way of capturing quick ideas down when chatting to colleagues, listening to podcasts, or youtube talks.meeting notes, todo lists and writing, short and long-form.My requirements for writing and note-taking are: I soon realised that all these apps were created with a very specific workflow in mind, and rather than falling-in with a different way of working, what if I could make the app fit to me, and come up with my specific workflow? My note-taking and writing requirements I love its simplicity and markdown formatting options. This wasn't Bear's fault - it's full of features and very flexible - almost too flexible. I could only find things if I remembered key words in what I'd written. There was little order to things, hashtags were nested three deep, and it was a mess. I would just fire it open, choose a hashtag and stick in my notes. For those new to it, it doesn't have folders, but hashtags instead, which act like folders. Focusing down on Bear AppĪnd that left Bear, which I felt I wasn't using properly - I'd been using it daily since April 2017, for both work and personal notes. I'd seen a lot of people swear by EverNote but it seemed to have a lot of features I just wouldn't use. SimpleNote and Apple notes looked great but too simple for my needs. Several apps have caught my eye for both writing and notes - Agenda, Ulysses, SimpleNote, EverNote, Apple Notes and my current idea-dumping-ground Bear.Īgenda looked interesting for its date-based approach, allowing you to write and schedule things on a calendar, and I downloaded a trial and started using it for a few days.Ī lot of writers I know swear by Ulysses, and it looks amazingly full-featured, but I felt it was likely overkill for me, as I'm unlikely to be publishing a book soon. Evaluating a few different writing apps - what works for me? I've been doing some research into note-taking systems, as I want to establish a more regular writing practice, get better and more productive at it, and share my thoughts and notes more openly.
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