10 Ways To Organize Your Notes

If you have a lot of notes in the Notes app you may want to try one or more of these techniques to organize them. You can use sorting, folders, tags, smart folders, links and other techniques.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can organize the notes on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. 
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So the Notes app is very popular for just jotting down quick ideas, or taking notes in meetings or classes. But pretty quickly your Notes app can get crowded with lots of different notes. It can be hard to find what you need. There are many different techniques that you can use to organize your notes inside the app. All of these ideas can be used on the Mac, iPhone, or iPad but I'm going to show you on the Mac.
So when you look at your Notes normally you should see three columns. Left sidebar here shows you your accounts, such as iCloud, and then you get to see folders and other things here on the left. If you don't see this click this button here and it will open up the left sidebar. Then you should see a column listing all your notes and then the notes to the right. If you don't see it like this make sure you have the List selected. If you select to view it in Gallery it looks like this and you have to dive down into each note individually. Now by default everything here is sorted by date. So you'll see, say, Today, Previous 7 Days, 30 Days, and so on. So this could be useful because it puts your most recently edited notes here at the top. There are a couple of variations you should know about.
First, you can go to View and you can have it Grouped By and either have it On or Off. So if you turn it Off the groupings are gone. It is just one long list sorted by Date. So set that how you like. This is on a per folder basis. So I'm using the Notes folder here which will show all of my notes. But if I had other folders, and we'll look at that in a minute, then each one can have its own Group By setting. In addition each can also have its own Sort By setting. The default is Date Edited. So every time you make a change to a note, even just adding one character, it's going to go to the top of the list. You may want to change that to  Date Created. Doing it that way means they will be sorted by when you created the note. Now in my example here of a college student taking notes for classes that may make more sense because each note would have been created on the day of the lecture. Then the note can be cleaned up and edited and added to over time but it won't change its place in the list. 
Now the most obvious way to organize your notes is to create new folders here. So you can do that by using File and then New Folder or Shift Command N. You create a new folder and call it whatever you want. So, for instance, I may want to make a folder called Lectures to hold all my notes for those. I'm going to go back to the Notes folder which shows all of your unfiled notes. I'm going to select just the ones that are lectures. So I'm going to Command Click to select more than one. So you can see I have created all of these as examples today. So normally these would be spread out over dates. I'm going to drag them all into Lectures. Now you can see they are not in Notes. So the Notes folder acts as something where you can find everything that is not in other folders. But if you go to All iCloud you're going to get everything there. These aren't duplicates. Like you'll see Spring semester notes here in All iCloud. You'll also see it in the Notes folder. They are just different ways of viewing the same notes that you have in the app. But the regular folders will only have each note in it once. So this note here is in Lectures. It's not in Notes. 
Now you can create as many folders as you need to organize your notes. You can also nest them. So, for instance, if I wanted to create a new folder called Philosophy Lectures then I can do that. You can see it creates it there. But I can move that inside the Lecture Folder. You can see I even open and close the Lectures Folder to show the subfolders. There is still nothing in there but if I dragged these two lectures in here then I would see them here. The top level still has all the unfiled ones. So I could create a Linear Algebra subfolder, an Astronomy subfolder, and so on. 
Now another useful technique for organizing your notes is to Pin one or two notes. I often get asked how can I keep a note at the top of the list. This is the way to do it. So select a note that you're going to be accessing all the time. I'm going to select this Spring semester note which is kind of a miscellaneous note here. I'm going to go to File and then Pin Note. So now this note is pinned and you can see it always appears at the top. Even though I've got this set to be sorted by Date Edited, the Pin notes always come first. You could also Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad, or right click on a mouse to Pin or unpin a note.  
Now if sorting by Date isn't for you you can always change that to Sort By Title. So, with the folder I want selected there I'm going to go to View and then Sort By and change it to Title. So now you can see it is in alphabetical order. This is on a per folder basis. So if I were to create a new folder called Lectures and then move all the lectures there. You can see in Lectures it is sorted by Day and in the Notes folder here it is sorted by Title. Once you've set sorting you can also change it here. If you change it back to default you can see you can't change it there. You've got to go to View and then Sort By. I can go now to Lectures here and I can decide I want the Lectures Folder to be sorted by Title. So now it could be a little easier to find things. You can even go ahead and set the sort order by giving them titles. So for instance if I want Philosophy to come first I might change that to put a 1 in front of all the Philosophy ones like that. Or an A or something else that would put them at the top. 
Another thing you may want to do is use emoji in Titles. You don't have to stick to just plain text. So, for instance, for my astronomy classes I may want to go ahead and add emoji character. I'm going to use fn or the Globe Key and e and you could see it is even going to suggest something seeing the next word is astronomy. I'm going to click here and do a Search for star or planet or something like that that I think will fit. I'm going to choose this little icon here, Saturn. I'm going to put it actually at the beginning like that.  I'm going to Copy it. I'm going to put it before all the astronomy lectures. Now all this does is create a neat visual cue for me to be able to see which lectures belong together and quickly find the one I want. This is more of a technique to help you quickly find a note than it is to actually organize them. But the result is the same. 
Now a major way to organize is by using Tags. It's easy to add a tag to any note. You can add them anywhere you  want. You can do it in the body of the text, you can do it as you type, you can put it in a title, you can put it on its own line. However you want to do it. So, for instance, the one thing I can do is I can tag the astronomy courses Astronomy or maybe Astronomy 101. So I'm going to put a hashtag before the word astronomy. I'm going to get rid of the space there. Now it's not going to switch that to a hashtag but if I pretend I was typing and put a space after it, like that, i can just delete the space after.  You can see now it's hashtag Astronomy 101. I can do the same thing. If I was starting this note fresh and I just typed that it would do it automatically. So let's go and do that for each one of these and now you can see all my Astronomy classes are tagged with the same thing. Now if I look in the left sidebar under Tags and I reveal the tags I'll see Astronomy 101. If I click on that it will show me the notes that match that tag. So I can forget about folders and sort order and all of that and just have my notes just in any old order in the main notes folder there and just use Tags to find things. 
I could also do it like this. Just put a line near the top. I could be at the bottom. I'll just call it Tags (you don't have to) but you can put the tags that you want here. So, for instance I can put something like Lecture as a tag. I can do another tag that could be, say, Spring 2024. Do another tag that is Astronomy or just an abbreviation like Astro 101, like that. I can use that same line in all of the Astronomy lectures like this. Then I could do something similar here for other classes. So you can see I've tagged all my courses like this. If I look at the tags here on the left I can see all of these different tags. If I look for Lecture, for instance, I'll see all my lectures. If I want to see everything for Spring 2024 I can see that and notice both are selected here. I can turn this one Off by clicking it twice till it is just grayed out again. I'll see all of Spring 2024. 
Now you can also use negative tags. How you do that is you don't change the tags here at all. But you could have something, like say I want to see all Spring 2024 but not Linear Algebra. By selecting this it is now going to show me where tags are All selected or Any selected. If I click again here then it negates Linear Algebra. The result is I see all of my Spring 2024 lectures but with Linear Algebra excluded. Now where this comes in handy is if you want to archive something. So let's say I want to go into this one. Let's say this isn't from Spring 2024 but this is from Fall 2022. So an old course. I can add another tag here. I can call it Old or Finished or Archived, like that. Now what i can do in Tags is say I want to see all the lectures but I want to negate the Archived one there. So it's only going to show me the lectures that aren't archived. 
Now if there is a configuration of Tags that you access often like having all your lectures minus the archived you can create a Smart Folder for that. So go to File and then New Smart Folder here. Give it a name. So let's call this one Current Lectures. We're going to now set the Tags up with All selected. What we're going to do here is we're going to say we want Lectures and we also want to look at the Archived Tag. Now if you want to have things selected Lecture and Archive, both, so Archived Lectures this would be the way to set it up. If you wanted to have them setup where anything that's tagged with either Lecture or Archive you would change to Any selected. But if you wanted to have Lecture excluding Archive you would click here and you would go to Exclude. So now you can see here Lecture Excluding Archive. So, I click Okay. Now this Smart Folder is going to be a place I can quickly go to see anything tagged with Lecture but it's also missing the tag Archive. So you can use a few different Smart Folders to quickly get to the Tag combinations you use the most. 
Now another thing you can do to organize is to use Links. You can Link from note to note. So, let's say here in this Astronomy lecture I want to link to this other astronomy lecture there. All I need to do is say right where I want the link to happen. I can go to Edit and Add Link or Command K. I can link to and start a note Title. So if I know I want to link to the one that's the Lifecycle of Stars I can do Life  and I see it appears there. I select it. I can give it a different name if I want and say Okay. You can see it includes that link that if I click it it goes right to that other note. A quicker way to do this is to type the greater than symbol.That is Shift period on US English keyboard. Type that twice and it brings up this little list here. So then you can select the one you want and get a link to it. Or you can just include it at the end of a note. You can do something like, you know, also see and then include links to other notes, like that. 
Now since you can link to other notes you could actually do something really interesting when it comes to organization. You can create a note that is just for linking to other notes. This could be a Home Page or a Table of Contents. So, let's create a new note here and let's call it Spring 2024 Lectures. Then here we can create a heading, let's call this Astronomy 101. Then make this a Heading. Now on the next line we can start a list here to other notes. So I'm going to do two greater thans there  and link to this Astronomy one, and then do it again. There's another Astronomy one. Do it again and there I go. So I can continue to add notes here. This note can keep growing as I need it. I can easily reorganize it, for instance putting this subject after this. I can add emoji to it if I want. Color it up something like this. I can make these List, for instance, and go in here and make it a bullet list of items and then I can use indentation if I want to put one lecture under another, or create subheadings. That kind of thing. 
So you can see there's a ton of different ways. You don't have to settle on just one. You can put all your notes in folders but also use Tags and Links to other notes if you want. Maybe a Table of Contents note in addition to that. Pin some of the notes. You can use all these in combination or use none of them if you find it is just okay. Just have them sorted by date or alphabetically and you can find what you need. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 14 Responses to “10 Ways To Organize Your Notes”

Azguy

4 months ago

Useful post, thank you. Is there a way to organize the folders in alphabetical order?

Gary Rosenzweig

Azguy: Sort the folders themselves? No, Only manually. Hopefully you don't have that many. Maybe consider some of the other techniques here if you have that many notes.

Maclicious

Very informative. I use notes a lot and learned to use it better with Tags. I did not know about negative tags nor did I realize that you can link one note in another note. Notes may look simple on the surface, but it is actually proving to be quite a sophisticated application.

Ellen

Always so much information… for me a little too much info at one time… I cannot remember everything you pointed out. I’ll have to so over it a few times perhaps to remember all of this or get what I need. I am finding unfortunately that getting older makes it more difficult for me to learn a lot in one sitting. Nevertheless I enjoy hearing what you have to impart...

Jackie Bruno

I love how your presentations cater to everyone, from beginners to experts. While I often learn the most from the first half, I always listen to the entire thing. Over time, I'm gradually incorporating some of the more advanced techniques. Even though my needs are pretty basic, I appreciate learning about the full potential of the concept that you are discussing. I start off feeling comfortable with the basics, and before I know it, I'm I'm understanding more complex ideas.

Ken Nellis

I love the ability to link notes to other notes. The missing feature is a Back button to return to the referencing note. I don't suppose they added that in Sequoia…?

Larry White

Gary -- In my (latest) version of Notes, the way to disable the "Sort by Date" default is not in the View menu, as shown in your video -- it's in the Settings for Notes.

Chris Wolak

Thanks for showing how to link another note within a note. The idea of creating a home page/table of contents is a game-changer!

Lali

Very useful video Thanks

esther

how the heck did you figure out the back-space/tag trick??? I would never have that of that.

AND THE NEGATING TAGS!! wow!!!

David

Long-time Notes user with 4500+ notes - AND I learned some organizational techniques here I was not aware of. Thanks, Gary!

Bob

2 months ago

I use notes to help keep track of specific client adobe Indesign files. I can just reference the file name in the note but when I drag and drop the file icon into the notes app instead of creating a link to the note it copies it to a notes specific folder which means I now have two copies of the file and that spells trouble. Is there a way to have notes simply create a hyperlink to the original file?

Bob: Use file:/// links instead. Just type file:// and than paste the link to the file (use Option+Command+C in the Finder with the file selected). Not that it will include three slashes there like I show.

10 Ways To Organize Your Notes

Comments: 14 Responses to “10 Ways To Organize Your Notes”

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