No
two people take notes the same way. But one thing is common among all
note-takers: they always feel their system could somehow be better.
Deciding which features are crucial and which can be skipped is why there are thousands of note-taking apps in the Apple App Store alone. Some sync to an online service, some try to pare things down to just black text on a white background, and some have more buttons than they do customers. What’s worth checking out?
Ask a guy (that would be me) who spent five years as a notepad-toting journalist; more than three years writing about, testing, and responding to commenter criticisms of note apps at Lifehacker; and who has since tried mightily to make his note-taking actually fit into his strange freelance writing habits. I’ve seen and tried it all. Here are my recommendations for three kinds of note schemes:
Computer and iPhone-based notes: PlainText
There are a lot of text editors that use files in the cloud storage service Dropbox as their base. My favorite is PlainText. It’s simple to use and can work with another person if needed. PlainText is an iPhone/iPad-based app, but any text editor that can edit .txt files in a Dropbox account can work with it. Android users can start with Jota+Draft, though there are many other options.
PlainText is uncluttered and reminiscent of paper writing while being relatively easy on the eyes during long editing sessions. If you want to share notes with a coworker or spouse, you can do that as well. A friend of mine with a newborn uses PlainText to sync up baby info between his wife’s iPhone and his own. It also organizes your work in folders without making you feel like you’re in a file system.
So why not Evernote?: Evernote is the Chipotle of cloud-based note systems: popular, full-featured, and seemingly everywhere. But I avoid it because I’m too easily distracted to sort through my “everything bucket.” I don’t want to see gift ideas when I’m trying to write about note-taking apps, and it can be a bit depressing to catch a glimpse of my huge list of to-dos when looking for a dinner recipe. But if you’re an Android user and Jota+Draft isn’t your cup of tea, you may want to check it out.
Paper notebooks: Use colors
For someone advanced beyond grade school and not grading papers, it can seem silly to take the time to color-code your notes. But there are good reasons to do so:
- Colored notes are easier to scan and less monotonous to dig through.
- They separate facts and questions, different sources, and your to-do’s and to-asks, so it’s easy to find the information you need at a glance.
- Coloring does even more to make notes stick in your mind.
So, which notebook?: Buy any notebook that feels like a comfortable size for your hand, spacing for your words, and price for your budget. Moleskine, Field Notes, a 99-cent spiral pad from the drugstore—it doesn’t matter. The best notebook, like the best camera, is the one you have with you.
Voice notes: Rev Voice Recorder (iPhone) or Tape-A-Talk (Android)
If you’re an iPhone type, you can do much worse than Rev Voice Recorder. As a simple record-and-save app, it’s pretty good at its job. It organizes and dates your recordings and lets you share them out via email, Dropbox or Evernote, or dump them onto your computer via iTunes sync. The value added is that you can also have longer brainstorms or two-person conversations reliably transcribed for $1 per minute by actual human beings.
Android users should try out Tape-a-Talk. It’s a feature-rich app that records high-quality audio from all kinds of sources, and saves it or sends it to your storage space of choice. For note-to-self sessions, the Pro version ($5) has dictation-style tools to record over mistakes and simple editing tools.
Why not the built-in app on my phone?: Mostly because the important things you record should be saved outside your phone too, because phones get lost, stolen or dropped. And the built-in recording tools often produces weird file names that can make notes difficult to find, while also having no helpful features to assist with note-taking.
What about you? What tools or methods do you find to be the most efficient and productive for your job or at your office? Let us know in the comments below.
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