I have been using Apple Notes for most of my note-taking lately. I have been a hardcore [Org-Mode](https://orgmode.org/) fan for decades. I take an incredible amount of notes, and both systems make it super easy to find, link, and classify notes.
I have recently moved from Org-Mode to Apple Notes because it is easy to find and update my notes on desktop and mobile platforms. The ability to have everything synced up is something I can’t do without.
For years, I have been on the fence about task management. I have tried everything, and my real go-to application was Org-Mode. Second was OmniFocus. After finally sitting down and solidly planning how to separate work and personal life in OmniFocus, I pulled the plug and moved my whole personal and professional life to OmniFocus.
I’ll discuss how I separate my work and personal lives in depth if anyone is interested. Maybe an article based solely on that.
If you are unfamiliar with The Omni Group, they pretty much nailed anything to do with creating outlines with a computer. No one else does it as well, and their paradigm seems to have stood the test of time.
They produce another note-taking product called OmniOutliner that I absolutely love . All the goodness of The OmniGroup’s nested list handling perfection, but it suddenly feels much more fiddly now that I have moved to Apple Notes.
The interface
I mentioned that I use Apple Notes for note-taking, but I also spend a great deal of time working with text in the Drafts app. This app is a simple formatted text creation and editing system. I use this when I am writing MarkDown. I am writing this article in Drafts.
Here’s what is to love about both Apple Notes and Drafts. When you open the app, you are presented with a giant window to all of your notes. From there, you can adjust your view of the world by filtering, searching, taxonimies, etc. Or, you can immediately create a new note. There is no friction in getting started or continuing.
I use my note-taking programs to take notes and develop documents that will be distributed. I also link everything together using HookMark, so the process is super simple and efficient.
In the case of starting a project (meaning anything with multiple tasks), I’ll usually do the following:
- Create a project in OmniFocus
- Create a note in Apple Notes for that project by simply starting a new note.
- Using HookMark, link the note and the task together
- Create any other notes for subtasks, etc. Link these all together
This is super simple and efficient.
BUT!
I really love using OmniOutliner for note-taking. It’s a great tool, and I have no problems with it at all. The only real issue is the tedium involved in creating a note. To use OmniOutliner in this workflow, I have to do the following:
- Create a document
- Save the document. This requires extra steps.
- Figure out where to save the document
- Create any infrastructure required
- Finally, link up the document.
The other issue is that editing a document is also heavy handed. There is no taxonomy system, and the documents don’t belong to the borg. To find existing documents, you must put some time and effort into finding them.
If we could update OmniOutliner as follows, I would use it every single day of my life. Maybe 100 times a day.
- Adopt the paradigm that Drafts and Apple Notes use, where the app is a giant collection of documents.
- Allow tagging, folders, etc, in the document interface so that a document doesn’t feel like a foreign entity.
The other issue I find is that in a great deal of cases, I create a PDF of my notes and send them to people on project teams. OrgMode was incredible in this case, as it used LaTeX for formatting documents. Apple Notes seems to do an okay job out of the box, and while my urge is to make the output look great, I can get past this.
The issue I have with OmniOutliner is that I use one of the dark mode themes for document editing. When I print this document, it prints using the dark theme, and there are extra steps required to print out a document in black on white.
In closing
I am guessing that most of these issues may have been addressed, but it doesn’t seem obvious anywhere. I wouldn’t mind workarounds, if they didn’t require extra steps, but at this point, I may have been spoiled by the interfaces of Apple Notes and Drafts.
I still use OmniOutliner (I have had a pro license since they started selling them). I will probably continue to buy a pro licence in the future. I would just love to use OmniOutliner as my go to note taking system, because at the end of the day, the document editing system rules.
