The Perfect Note-Taking App

Key Takeaways

hey friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is ali i'm a doctor based in the uk and today we're talking about how to find the perfect note-taking app i've been trying to do this for the last like 10 years of my life and i've come to realize that finding the perfect note-taking app is kind of like finding someone to get married to in that there are four similarities and one key difference between the two spheres of life so if you're anything like me and you stay up at night thinking about evernote or rome or notion or obsidian or rem note or all the other different ones then hopefully this video will be vaguely helpful as a way of like a framework for thinking about how to approach the choice of note taking out similarity number one is that when we're trying to find love there is no such thing as a soul mate the whole like disney fication of romance and romanticism has led us to kind of believe that you know there's that one perfect person out there for everyone that is obviously a total myth there are millions of people out there that will be compatible with you and i for the most part and actually most of the success of a marriage or a relationship comes from the effort that you put into it rather than the pre-existing compatibility in fact in the words of philosopher alain de bottom compatibility is an achievement of marriage it should not be its prerequisite and so just like there's no such thing as a soulmate there is also no such thing as the perfect note-taking app and it took me ages to actually realize this because you realize kind of when jumping from one to another to another like they're all different in subtle ways and they all have their pros and cons and if we're trying to find the perfect app we're gonna end up not getting anywhere at all what matters is finding the app that generally gels with your personality and then knowing how to use it properly and knowing how to make it work for you so in a way you and the app you kind of grow together to form this symbiotic relationship and it's like a nice thing secondly and probably most importantly um in relationships and love and stuff also i've heard different people are attracted to different types of personalities there is no one-size-fits-all solution and it's exactly the same with note-taking apps and there's an analogy that i came across on the internet this week on the blog nest labs which is one of my favorite vlogs it's all about like mindful productivity and that kind of cool stuff she talks about how there's basically kind of three types of people in the world and three types of note-taking apps to like gel with those sorts of people and that is gardeners librarians and architects so let's say you are a librarian personality something like evernote or onenote would be perfect for you because it's like everything has its distinct place every note is within a notebook and a notebook can be within a stack it's a very library-like system of organization and just like in a library there are hundreds maybe even thousands of books that you will never read equally stuff like evernote you know people joke that it's a write-only type system that you put stuff into evernote and then you end up not really looking at it but if you're a librarian you know archetype type of person then maybe you'll you'll enjoy that type of organization i'm not a very librarian person myself so i don't use evernote or onenote as my main note-taking apps but i know a lot of people who do and for example thiago forte who runs the fantastic online course building a second brain link in the video description this course changed my life and changed everything he uses evernote as his second brain a kind of central digital note-taking system and even though evernote is like super old it was made in like 2004. it still has fantastic features that if you are a librarian sort of person you will really gel with evernote secondly you might be a gardener type personality archetype and for those people we've got apps like rome and obsidian and remnant and a few others rome is the one that i use personally because some of my thinking is kind of gardner mode and the idea behind these note-taking apps is that it's it's a lot less structured it tends to be kind of very open-ended you can kind of do what you want and as a gardener you're sort of tending to your collections of notes over time without like a clear organizational sort of rigid structure behind it so for gardeners something like evernote would be way too rigid because it forces you to think in certain ways and a gardener doesn't want that a gardener kind of wants to start off with a blank slate and build there build a garden from the ground up and that's the kind of thing that rome is really useful for so if you have that sort of personality you might like to give those a go and thirdly we've got the architect personality archetype which is probably the one that i fit into most and that is where you kind of want things to be organized and you want to build your own structured organizational system you don't want to be pigeonholed into like a rigid hierarchy like evernote and onenote force you to but you also don't really like just the pure freedom that a gardner app like rome or obsidian would give you and that's where an app like notion really works nicely because as an architect in my mind i can kind of design my organizational life operating system however i want it and if i want i can be rigid with kind of notes and notebooks or if i want i can use the database features i can use link databases i can i can kind of do whatever i want it's my blank slate but it's not so kind of free flowy networky as stuff like rom is and that is why i use notion most of all for the stuff that i do because it kind of gels with that side of my personality and so just like with relationships you know there's a different personality for different people it's the same with note-taking apps and so when i make a video about using rome people in the comments are like oh my god i switched my life to notion and now you're starting to use room like yeah yeah it it like it basically doesn't matter like the app that you use is kind of important but what's more important is you find one that fits your personality rather than you see oh my god ali abdullah and thomas frank are using notion therefore i have to switch my entire life over to notion that's not really the way to think about it thirdly when it comes to marriage and relationships and stuff getting a divorce is messy and expensive and it's sort of the same with switching note-taking apps like let's say you've been using evernote since 2005 for the last 15 years and you've got thousands and thousands of notes on evernote if you would suddenly decide you know i've seen some of these videos about notion this seems fun and you want to switch entirely from evernote to notion there is going to be a cost associated with that it's going to be messy and it's going to be expensive it's going to require you to put some energy in to learn a new system to understand how it works and you've got to decide for yourself is the switching cost actually worth it based on the new features of the app it would be like kind of having a marriage where you're you're quite happy you've got you know the wife you've got some kids you've got it you've built a life together and then this i don't know hot new secretary comes along and you think you know what do i want to switch my life over and get a divorce and just kind of get with the secretary you know i'm not saying that's a morally bad thing to do necessarily but i am saying that you want to think twice before just jumping ship willy nilly as it were and so yeah don't think that you have to switch to a note-taking app just because there's a new one on the block think about the system that works for you and it might be time for you to switch if the benefit of switching to notion or roam overrides the value that you've built up in an app like evernote but there is a cost to switching and we do have to keep that in mind and our fourth similarity between relationships and note-taking apps is that meaningless sex is ultimately unfulfilling or so i've heard people say that a lot of the value of a relationship comes from the investment that you put into it rather than from kind of screwing around and moving from one person to the next person to the next person because that ultimately doesn't really lead anywhere and it's the same with no taking apps like you can spend age just trying to find the perfect one but if you are one of those people that you know shiny new toy syndrome you're chasing after that in a hot new thing and you know one day using evernote the next week using notion then you're switching to rom then switching to obsidian and then you're like trying to find something else ultimately that's probably unfulfilling because all you're doing is going around in circles and running on the hamster wheel and just being like oh this is a shiny new toy let me try that out but actually if we think about the point of a note-taking app it's so that we can take notes for ourselves to help our own learning and our own creativity and our organization and so we can convert those notes into outputs because ultimately there's not a lot of point in us hoarding our knowledge internally what matters is that we're sharing it in the form of blog posts or tweets so videos like this one or instagram posts or whatever and so if you're just going from one app to the next to the next to the next in pursuit of the perfect note-taking app which you're never gonna find because there's no such thing as a soulmate you're ultimately not actually doing anything useful but there is one crucial difference between note-taking apps and relationships and that is when it comes to relationships polyamorous relationships almost never work out like it's really hard to make them work in theory they should work but if you read accounts from anyone who's tried them for the most part it seems like it's really really hard it takes a lot of communication it takes a lot of emotional resilience to make a polyamorous relationship work and the difference between that and note-taking apps is that it's completely cool to make a polyamorous relationship work with note-taking apps there is absolutely no need to find one app and only one app that you're going to use for everything because different apps like we talked about before have pros and cons and have different ways of thinking and so for me for example i use notion and rome and evernote and drafts a combination of those four for my various note-taking needs so for me evernote forms like the base long-term memory layer of my system i kind of chuck all the resources all the pdfs all the receipts all the kind of corporation tax bills i i use evernote as my set it and forget it filing system because i i understand that whenever i want like if i need to get my company's corporation tax number i know i just need to search corporation tax in evernote and it will somehow find it using the optical character recognition it will figure out what text is in all the pdfs that i've stored equally if i'm suddenly researching a topic like um i was researching membership sites the other day and i found a load of resources evernote is just the easiest place to save all of that stuff because it can just handle anything you throw at it from images to scans to pdfs to web pages to snippets to everything whereas apps like roman notion you have to do a little bit more hacking to just allow them to accept absolutely anything at all so for me evernote is the base layer of my note-taking system then we've got kind of like the personal notes aspect of it and that's what i use rome for so i tend to use the rom daily notes feature to just kind of take some notes on my day i tend to use rome for taking notes on books and podcasts and videos that i've watched because i find that the bi-directional linking structure of rome is really nice but i still only use row maybe 10 of the time and i find that over probably about 80 percent of my time is still using notion because i'm firstly an architect personality and so that works for me but also because notion has a lot of team collaboration features that rome lacks and therefore if i'm producing videos or blog posts or podcasts or whatever most of that stuff is now done with my team of people who help me out with stuff and so it makes sense for us to use notion as our central kind of source of truth for everything and because notion is so full featured you can kind of create whatever organizational system you want in in notion and so we've built our own system for dealing with the video pipeline for the email newsletter pipeline link in the description for our skillshare class pipeline we have all of these different workflows and different pipelines for dealing with different types of content and that's the stuff that rome is really difficult to work with especially as part of a team and that evernote doesn't really give us the flexibility to have a kanban board and have like to-do lists and all that sort of stuff so you know i am in a polyamorous relationship with notion rome and evernote and i use drafts just for quick capture like if i'm driving and taking notes from a podcast i will dictate them into the drafts app on my apple watch and the reason i use drafts is because it syncs very nicely with the api with evernote and it's very easy to use and also because they've got like really a really good dictation feature and it's just super quick and loads very very quickly whereas rom takes ages to load notion takes ages to load and evernote is really slow and bloated and therefore takes ages to load so i'm in this polyamorous relationship with these four note taking apps and that is how my personal system is built but that's not to say that you have to use all of them it's not to say you have to use any of them you know the point is that when it comes to building building a second brain i think in a video description or building our own perfect digital note-taking system it's the kind of thing that it depends so much on our personality depends on what we need to get done and hopefully evolves with us over time it's not something that you have to get perfect from the get-go just like a relationship so hopefully that was useful in terms of thinking about note-taking apps i'll put a playlist over here of other videos where i talk about how i use notion evernote roam and draft in various different ways and you can hit the link in the video description to sign up to building a second brain which is the online course that my whole digital note-taking system is built on and i'm a mentor in that course so if you sign up to the live cohort then uh i will be mentoring you on live zoom calls over the next like four weeks so thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye