Notes And The Four Note Modes

Apple Notes, Bear, Obsidian and Tot. Four different note-taking apps. And I use them all. At least once a week. Sometimes every day.

I could use just one app. That works for a lot of people. And it’s the advice that most productivity gurus and grifters seem to offer. One app for everything.

But it’s that guru-and-grifter advice that got me wondering. For a while, Notion was the app that could do everything. Then it was Obsidian. That’s great for people who sell courses on the promise that one app will change your life.

But if you are trying to do things, and not just sell advice to others on how to do things, you might find yourself asking questions.

The questions I had were about the nature of notes. Their modality, if you will. At its essence, a note is a piece of information we write down. Even if we focus on electronic notes, some notes contain information we want to keep forever. While the usefulness of other notes expires within minutes. Some notes evolve over time. While other notes never change.

Notes and Note Modes

As I thought about this, making notes about notes, I came to see that, for me, notes have four modes.

1. Notes as a constellation of thoughts
2. Notes as a collection of information
3. Notes as a guide to completing a major project
4. Notes as a store of ephemeral details

And for each of these modes, I use a specific app.

1. Obsidian for thoughts
2. Apple Notes for information
3. Bear for guiding a major project
4. Tot for temporary details

Obsidian is for thinking. It’s a storehouse of ideas and concepts. Highlights from articles and books. Insights from life. Reflections on work and projects. Snippets from things I’ve written. Questions I want to explore. Because of Obsidian’s graph and linking tools, it helps me make connections between ideas.

The notes in Obsidian keep evolving. Often, revisiting a note is an opportunity to rewrite it. Expand upon it. To link it to other notes. Or create new notes about related ideas. Obsidian’s graph shows me the notes as a constellation of ideas. But I also like to think of them as a garden. Ideas are planted, fed and watered, and pruned so they can grow together.

Apple Notes is more like a filing cabinet or a compactus. It’s a place to store specific information. The way I use Apple Notes reflects David Allen’s notion that our brains are for “having ideas, not holding them”. These notes contain everything from settings on domestic appliances to my favourite seats in various cinemas from Tokyo to Melbourne.

These notes don’t really change once they are written. There’s no editing or revision here. It’s just recall. Search and find. Use and move on.

Tot is the digital equivalent of Post-it notes or scribbles on a notepad. I use Tot for small notes during the day. Like shopping lists or temporary passwords. It’s a place to hold dates and details while planning travel. Or maybe to write the first draft of an email or other communication that will be sent later that day.

Bear used to be my main note-taking app. But the other apps are better for the uses I’ve mentioned above. However, there is one specific use for which Bear still shines.

Right now, I’m trying to move my site off WordPress. I want to end up with a site that is lighter, safer and not bogged down in outdated ideas about how websites should work. To do this, I’m having to do a lot of learning, choosing which bits of information I want to incorporate into my new site and storing chunks of code along the way (something Bear does very well).

These are project-specific notes. And it is a big, gnarly, slow-moving project.

At some point, some of these notes will end up in Apple Notes as things I need to remember about the new site. A few might end up in Obsidian as ideas about how websites should be designed and built. But a lot of the notes will cease to be worth keeping because they’ll just be part of the architecture of the new site. Choices that found their final form in the site’s design and implementation.

Deeper into Note Modes

We could put these modalities of notes on a graph. One axis showing how long the note needs to be kept. The other showing how likely the note is to change.

This allows us to see the modalities for each note-taking app.

1. Obsidian: enduring and changeable
2. Apple Notes: enduring and unchanging
3. Bear: ephemeral and unchanging
4. Tot: ephemeral and changeable

This works for me because I’ve also made two upfront decisions – meta-strategies, if you like. First, I’m not interested in an everything app. Second, I’m not looking for an eternal and all-encompassing archive.

The Allure of the Everything App

It’s not just the grifters with their promise of one app to solve all your problems who put me off a single solution for all kinds of notes. There’s also the challenge of making one app work for all four modalities.

Doing that requires designing a system and customising how the app works. It’s like another layer of work. Some people love that. I don’t. It’s not that I object to customising settings or designing workflows. But time can’t be stretched indefinitely.

For me, the cost of switching apps is low. Especially if the purpose of the app is well defined. That’s why thinking about the different kinds of notes and their modes matters. This helps avoid putting notes in the wrong place. And makes it clear which app to use for what purpose.

On Not Being a Collector

I’m not interested in cataloguing every thought I have. Or recording every experience. I don’t need to compress my whole life into a database. Or save every note I make forever.

I feel like the online productivity space is dominated by the idea that adult life should be an extension of university and high school. Challenges should be repackaged into lessons. Everything is explained. And notes are like an insurance policy against being examined, which will always take the form of regurgitating prepackaged bits of information.

I don’t find that idea appealing. It also doesn’t feel like an accurate picture of what it means to be an adult.

Life has a lot more mystery and ambiguity. And many moments of incompleteness. We learn things we never use. And we sometimes improvise answers on the spot.

I think about this in relation to what it means to be or not to be a collector. I have a lot of music gear, for example, but I’m not a collector. I have a few 9 Series Ibanez guitar effect pedals. But I have no desire to own the whole series. I have the ones that help me make music.

Someone can be a collector of music gear and not even be able to make music. Or maybe they made music once, but no more. There are offices and lounge rooms all over the world with guitars as adornments. Cupboards full of music gear that hasn’t made music in years.

My assortment of music gear is incomplete, imperfect – maybe even wrong in the eyes of some. I don’t know every setting on every device. And it doesn’t really matter. The tools work for me in the way I need them to.

My notes are the same.