How I organise my notes in 2024

My notes always seemed messy, even to me. And then I realized they are actually organized in a certain way that pleases my brain.

Everyone is searching for the perfect notes app, the ONE notes app that will rule them all. But for me, and for as long as I can remember, I always had several different apps. In my Android days, I had 3 notes apps on my phone that had the same exact features.

Why, you ask? Because I like to put similar thoughts into their own boxes. This way my brain knows in which box to look when I need to find a thought on a certain subject.

Every thought has its place in a different app, and here is my system.

• Project Ideas
• Open Source Package
• Tasks on a Big Project
• Blog Posts
• Everything Else
• Conclusion

# Project Ideas

I have a lot of ideas. More than I can or will code in my life. And for most of my life, I just put those ideas everywhere. In a .txt file on my desktop, on my notepad, on my phone. Literally everywhere.

Last year I decided to organize them because it became overwhelming to have so many ideas. I also discovered some nice old ideas I had totally forgotten about on an old disk.

This article from Andrew Schmelyun helped me find a system to organize my code projects and ideas.

I have four columns for my ideas: Backlog, Promising, Working On, Monitoring, and Archived. If I think of an idea, I create a new card in the Backlog and dump as much info as I can into it. Framework to use, pain points that I could encounter, potential domain names, you get the picture.

Then, I do nothing.

Basically, I use Trello to organize my ongoing and future projects into columns. Unlike Andrew, I put the minimum information there: just a name or a sentence.

If the idea is growing in my head with some details it should include or a tech stack it should use: I put these additional notes in Apple Notes in a directory named Projects where there is only one note per project.

And that's it.

# Open Source Package

I don't have that many open source projects, or should I say not big enough ones. In a livestream, I saw Brendt using Github Issues as notes for his projects, checkout tempest framework.

And I think it's the best place to put those bugs & ideas: next to the package.

# Tasks on a Big Project

If you don't know, my biggest project in progress is unolia.com where I'm making the best place to manage your domains.

My notes are separated into two places:

• If I'm working on a feature and I need to dump new ideas on paper: Apple Notes. Because it's the fastest way to get back some RAM in my head!
• If I have more than 5 seconds: Linear. Everything is eventually put there. I use priority sometimes to find important tasks at a glance. But most importantly, I use cycles to remember to take breaks and to take a step back.

Sometimes I also use TODO comments in my code. Either because I need to remember to do this before committing and if I forget Phpstorm will tell me just before. Or either because I intend to rewrite or refactor something later and it makes sense to put this note next to the concerned code.

# Blog Posts

An easy one, every time I have a blog post idea, I just create a draft.

Sometimes I never write the article, sometimes I write it a year later, and sometimes, being on the admin panel of my blog pushes me to write it now.

I use to note how-to tutorials when I learn something new. It's cool because when I try to recreate something I did before, I know I have a tutorial ready here. Most of the time, I put the article online when I need to reuse my article. By having to read it again, it gives me the motivation to finish it with examples and screenshots so it can be useful to others.

# Everything Else

For the rest: Notes on my phone (and my Mac). It's synced between my devices. I have some directories to separate different subjects: project, personal, unolia.com, etc.

# Conclusion

The short version of this article is: put your notes where they belong.

I'm not saying you should use my system. I'm sure it doesn't work for a lot of you but I wanted to share mine because I had one for years and I just didn't notice. Hope you found this article interesting!