How to Quickly Find Notes When You Need Them Most

Do you ever scroll through your disorganized notes app, trying to find that one note you need, only to come up empty? I've been there and it's incredibly frustrating.

I'm not saying that after reading this newsletter you'll become a note-taking genius.

I'm not there yet either, but I can find what I need faster than I could a year ago.

I'm friends with some of the top students in my class. PSA: they take notes just like everyone else. The trick is, they can find what they need faster than others can. I'll show you exactly how.

To be honest, I never really took good notes in school. I would take the notebooks from the top of the class students and copy theirs into mine. It's a skill I got really really good at. I am impeccable at copying notes from other people. I would finish TV shows and fill out a whole notebook with notes.

I didn't understand anything or care about note-taking but we got points for having a completed notebook.

I thought highlighting the important points in the book would suffice and help me learn, so guess what. All of my books turned yellow.

When it came time to find the information, I couldn't find anything. I would flip pages for ages and still not find what I was looking for.

When I came to college, nothing changed for years. I was still highlighting every sentence, hoping to find it later, but never getting to it.

Then one day, I came across a video of Tiago Forte on YouTube. He mentioned a story about how his note-taking helped him in a critical moment. He had to go to a conference and speak about productivity but hadn't prepared anything. Instead of trying to remember things from the past and searching the web for information, he opened his notes app and searched for relevant hashtags like #productivity, #savingtime, and #getmoredone.

All of his notes from the past 10 years, including any thoughts, articles, and videos related to the topic, were there. He quickly jotted down the relevant points and had a speech ready for the conference.

This blew my freaking mind.🤯 Like what? You were just able to do that without opening a single browser page and still have every piece of information in your speech that you have come across.

I became a Tiago Forte Fanboy. You can find him on Twitter @fortelabs.

Anyways, this made me realize the power of great note-taking. So I started on my journey to perfect my note-taking system. Taking notes on paper is great, but it's not always convenient.

The easiest way is to open the notes app on your phone and type.

Here's my system: I use Apple Notes. It's simple, syncs across all my Apple devices, and comes with the devices I buy. Plus, it has a Tags feature, which is really important.

Alternatives are Evernote and Obsidian.

Let's say I'm listening to a podcast about how the former CEO of American Express shaped the company's culture with his leadership.

I find something interesting and need to write it down.

I open the notes app, create a new note, and type it.

Then I take a second to decide which hashtag(s) it fits in. In this case, it's #leadership and #culture.

Let's say 2 years later I'm running a business and want to talk to my team about shaping our company culture.

What I can do is spend hours researching on the web and share some boring ass advice. Or I can open the notes app and click on the #culture and #leadership tags. It will show me all the notes I've taken related to those topics including the one from that one podcast I heard 2 years ago which resonated with me. I can quickly read the information and share it with my team.

This system can be applied to any area of life. From school, college, job, and freelancing. Anything that requires you to put in the information of any kind.

No system is perfect, and I'm always making changes to mine. I'm exploring new tools, but so far this system has helped me in more ways than I can count.

If you learned something and found value, then it's a win-win for me.

In summary:

Create a note-taking system using an app that has the Tag's feature.

Use hashtags to categorize notes

Use tags to quickly find relevant information