I’ve tried all the major note-taking apps in the Apple ecosystem. For some years, starting more than a decade ago, I used Simplenote, then Drafts, then Bear. I used Ulysses for a while, though that’s really more of a text editor than a notes app. Obsidian, yep. Notion, yep. I tried Day One to take notes as well as keep a journal. I even tried Apple’s own Notes app, though I hate everything about it, starting with its ugly yellow color. Etc. (I’m not naming them all, so do not write me to ask “Have you tried … ?” Whatever it is, the answer is Yes: I have tried it.) My favorite was Notational Velocity, in its original form — I dislike all the supposedly more capable forks of it.
After a long while, I finally came to realize that what all note-taking applications have in common, what they primarily feature, is for me a bug. What they all offer is a place to store text — and in some cases images, though that starts to take us into Everything Bucket territory. And yes, I’ve tried all the Everything Bucket apps as well, starting with Evernote and then moving to Yojimbo and then DEVONThink — among others.
Anyway: the promise of the note-taking app is that you can jot down or copy bits of text, put them in folders or add tags or employ some other way to organize them, and then retrieve them later. But I didn’t retrieve them later. I dutifully tagged them and then … almost always forgot about them. If I happened to remember, then I could do a quick search and easily find them, but that was a rare event. Thus, the fact that all my little scraps of text were present and searchable did me no good at all. If I could have asked an app “Look through the hundreds of items in your database and find the five that would be of greatest interest to me right now,” and gotten a useful answer — well, then that app would have been tremendously useful to me. But technology hasn’t reached that point.
So for years I just kept on adding notes to apps and then forgetting about them. Lord knows what brilliant ideas of mine are hidden away in those now-neglected apps, because I have no idea how to search for them. I would just have to take time out to scroll through note after note after note, which of course makes the whole tagging-and-organizing thing pointless.
My search for a proper notes app ended when I realized that what virtually all notes apps do is counterproductive for me. The answer, for me, turned out to be Tot. Tot is beautiful, simple, limited in its formatting possibilities, easy of access on all my devices, and — this is the absolutely essential thing — it allows me to make seven notes. Seven. That’s it.
What that means for me is this: when I want to store a chunk of text, written by me or by others, I put it in Tot. But then, after a few days, I’ve run out of storage spots. So then I take a look at my most recent additions to Tot and ask myself: What do I want to do with this? I can put it in a micro.blog post, put it in a post for this blog, create a draft of an essay containing it, add some task associated with it to my Reminders list, or delete it. Tot’s limitations force me into that decision, and for me that’s ideal. Textual things don’t just disappear into the depths of a database: they have to be dealt with, so I deal with them. Productive resistance for the win, once again!
