Comparing Note-Taking Apps [QUICK Notes Series #4]

Hi, and welcome to The Daily Dot, the daily edition of the Connect the Dots podcast. My name is Matt Raglan, and in each episode I share a short lesson about how to be more focused and productive. I draw these lessons from personal experience, work with clients, modern psychology, and real-world application. Thank you for listening, and if you enjoy The Daily Dot, please share it with a friend. Now, here's today's lesson. This week we've been going through a series on note-taking. The first day we talked about the history of this type of Zettelkasten smart note-taking. We talked about Zonka Ahrens and Niklas Luhmann. We talked about why these are different than the notes that you probably scribbled down going through school. On day 2, we talked about how these could help you at work, how to start capturing smart notes, how to develop the different ideas that you have. And then in day 3, we talked more about how to expand on the ideas that you have and summarize the ideas of others. We talked about truly creating a knowledge base of your ideas so that you can use them as the building blocks for future work. So listen back through to make sure that you get all of that and it will help you create even, and it will help you have even more context for what we're going to talk about today. In today's episode, I want to share with you a few tips for starting your own analog note card stack. And give you a quick overview on a few different, like, actual digital tools that you can use in building your Zettelkasten, your knowledge base, your stack of digital smart or quick notes. Before we get into all of the cool tools and apps that you can use for note-taking, I just want to put in one more plug for the Humble Notecard for an actual index card style note card that you can write your ideas down on. And one of the things that I love about this, to bring it back, I mentioned this in an earlier episode in the series, is it helps you keep your ideas down to one card at a time. Okay? Think one card, one idea. And I really like this constraint because it's a little too easy to go too far, go too far down a rabbit hole with the different ideas and start connecting ideas together. That's really good. I love that you want to connect those and give context to them, but think, really think about as you're writing these, what is the one idea that I'm trying to communicate on this card and then communicate another idea on the next card and so on and so forth. Remember the quick note framework that as you're writing these, no matter what app or tool or index card you're using, you want it to be quality writing, a unique perspective to you, individual, as in one idea per card, contextual to other cards and ideas that you're putting together that you're writing out. And then as you're doing this, you're naturally creating this knowledge base, that K in knowledge is the K in Quick Notes, that help you create these building blocks of content and ideas that you can reassemble, reuse, and repurpose for any project or goal that you have in the future. You may be asking yourself, like, why have written notes, like actual written down with your hand notes? Instead of using something like Roam, something like Evernote or Notion. I still use all of those, which we're going to talk about as this episode goes on. My primary note-taking, digital note-taking app is Roam as of this, as of this point. But what I love about an analog note is that it's still like literally kind of strangely gives me so much joy to write and create, to put pen to paper and to express myself that way. And the other thing is, since it's an even albeit tiny complete work, it's okay to let it sit without migrating to digital for a bit. This note tends to have all the context that I need. And since I'm keeping one idea per note because of the constraints that I have, I, I'm not making them too big. I can always go back and start to add these bit by bit to something like Roam, to something like Notion or Supernote. All of which we're going to talk about in this episode. Roam Research is the one that I have ended up using the most for my notes, and there are a few reasons for this. It's really simple to get started with because on the surface it looks like a bunch of bullet points, and I don't want to get deep into the how to use Roam Research, the onboarding of it and everything, but essentially what you do is you start with your daily note and you just write down your notes from the day., and then it's really easy to link back to them. They have this little feature where you can put double brackets around any word or set of words, and that will automatically create a page that you can reference back to. So for example, if I am writing about note-taking, then I just put the word note-taking in double brackets, and then when I click on it, I start to see all of the notes that I have made over the past few years that reference this type of note-taking or quick notes or Zettelkasten. It's all connected in that note-taking page. I also find that the search is a little more useful than Notion because we are just mostly talking— because I am mostly using Roam just for word processing and words itself. It can do some other things, but I haven't found the media embeds like videos to be that useful. And so I don't really use them. Roam for me is almost entirely text-based., and so that makes the search a little bit easier. Even if I forget to put double brackets around a word like note-taking, if I just search for the word note-taking, then the search will show me every instance, whether it's linked or not, in my Roam database. And it's because of these references and the keyword search that I find Roam to be really useful for initial disorganized thoughts like note captures, or even if I'm migrating something over from Bear Notes or something from my field notes, I find it to be really easy for connecting ideas, at least the easiest of any of these apps that I'm going to share with you today. One easy win that you can have with note-taking and developing highlights into these durable notes is by integrating Roam and the next app I'm going to tell you about, which is Notion. You can integrate both of those with Readwise, which is a highlight capture app that will automatically import your Kindle and web article highlights to Roam or to Notion. So right away, I already have— these are the highlights from books that I've read. These are additional notes that maybe I've made on the Kindle or something that I've highlighted in Instapaper. There are a lot of different things that you can use Readwise for. Now, it isn't a paid app itself, but I think it's only like a few bucks a month. So I think for the amount of articles that I read and the number of books that I read on Kindle, it's 100% worth the fee for me. Now let's talk about Notion. And I love Notion. I use it for all of my projects and my long-term goal setting. I use it with my team. In terms of project management. There are a lot of things that I use Notion for. I think that the main difference from a note-taking perspective between Notion and Roam is Roam is really easy for me to capture and develop ideas independently from any other context that they might have because I can create the really quick contextual links in Roam. And that is something that has kept me on Roam from a note-taking perspective for a long time. What I still use Notion for often when it comes to notes is if I already know what context the note is a part of, then I will put it in Notion as well. I have a lot of notes that are about note-taking in Notion as well, but I tend to drop them into contextual projects. For example, when I'm doing a session in the Productivity Power-Up course on note-taking, I have a lesson page in Notion about note-taking, and I have all of my notes about note-taking in that page as well. Same thing for time management, same thing for goal setting. So when I have these notes that are contextual to a particular project or page that I already have in Notion, that's when I will drop them into that page or project. Because the other thing that I like about Notion, I often use it for, is the data and the databases in Notion are just light years better than Roam. Roam is great for text. Notion is not as great with text, but it's fantastic at everything else. Now, there is one thing that in terms of a contextual note-taking perspective that Notion has gotten better at and is something that I still think Roam is the winner in, but Notion is getting closer, and that's the ability to sync blocks or reference blocks in each app. For a really long time, one of the things that frustrated me the most about Notion when it came to note-taking is that if you wanted a piece of text to exist on two different pages, say for example, I had my note-taking page where I had all my notes about note-taking. I know this is getting a little meta, but then if I wanted to take that note from the note-taking page and put it into the note-taking lesson in the Productivity Power-Up course? Well, I'd literally have to copy and paste it, and that's not a big deal, but then you're not really sure what the initial source of it is. And when you go to search, it will bring up 3 or 4 different instances of that same block of text showing up on multiple pages. And in Roam, you never had to do that. You could click on a block or a bullet in Roam and copy that block reference. And then paste that block reference link into the other page or the other bullet that you might be referring back to that initial block. In Notion, you can do that now with their synced blocks feature, and it is helpful. It is way, way better than it was, but to me, it's still not as intuitive as a Roam block reference. So it's just kind of a difference between how you want to use each one. I want to make clear that I don't think that you should necessarily try both of these at once. Okay. Pick either Notion or Roam, or you can still use something like Apple Notes. You can use Google Docs. You can use Bear Notes, which I mentioned in the last episode. I really like all of these, but from a knowledge base building perspective where I'm creating this second brain, as it were, as Tiago Forte likes to reference it, I like to use Notion and Roam. The third app that I have toyed around a little bit with, and I do like because of the simplicity of it, is a tool called SuperNotes. And what I like about it is they are really trying to recreate the note card digitally. So when you sign on to SuperNotes and you're looking through this and you're setting up these notes, you are constrained by 1,200 characters, basically a few paragraphs. And if you remember what I talked about with the benefits of analog note-taking, I actually really like that you have a constraint so that you are forced to keep one idea per card. With Roam, with Notion, you can kind of get a little off track to saying like, well, it makes me think of this idea and this idea, and don't forget about this, and we're going down the rabbit hole here. With Supernote, you have to keep that I, that individual I in Quick Notes, high on your mind because you are constrained by 1,200 characters. If you get too far over that, you need to start thinking about, hey, do I need to split this into two ideas? How could this be even more individualized than I thought it was at the beginning? The other thing that I like about Supernote, just from a design perspective, is that you can create these card clusters or categories and use, and use those to outline content with hierarchies. So really the same way that I use analog note cards of Keeping it constrained, one idea per card, clustering these cards together to create a content outline or to create an outline of the next project that I'm going to use these notes to create the building, the initial building blocks of, you can do all those things in Supernote. I will say that based on how I've used it so far, it does get a little confusing at times about how you're going to organize them, where the contextual links are. Now you can add tags and footnotes and create them in different stacks or hierarchies. You can use the same card in multiple hierarchies, so you're not limited to just like one at a time. But Supernote is something that I'm really intrigued in. I'm definitely keeping my eye on and like to use it occasionally for how I'm just thinking through new potential solutions for my digital note-taking stack. There are a ton of note-taking and personal knowledge management apps in the market right now. One that is also very popular is the Reflect app. Another is Obsidian, which is a lot like Note— another is Obsidian, which is a lot like Roam. There is a deep rabbit hole that you could go down when it comes to note-taking and referencing your work back and forth to different notes and creating context and stacks of ideas. What I want to encourage you on, no matter what tool you choose, is try not to go too far down the rabbit hole and try not to spread yourself too thin in trying out new tools. What I would think about doing for testing for each of these is use each one to create a single content or note stack, like put together 10 to 15 or 20 note cards worth of material and see how you could organize it for a project that you have. Use it for a book that you're reading through, whatever it is, just try and keep your initial project or stack of notes very clear what you're using it for so that you can get an idea of the pros and cons for you of the different apps that you might be trying. And that way you'll be able to learn which one is best for you, which works best for your personality, for the way that you like to take notes, and especially the way that you like to sort and organize them. In tomorrow's episode, I'll give you a big picture overview of everything that we've talked about for the past 5 days so that you can get started on your note-taking practice. Thanks for listening to The Daily Dot. I really appreciate it. The best way to help the show grow is by sharing with a friend, but the other way is to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I'd love to hear from you on Twitter or Instagram. You can find me @MattRagland. I'll be back tomorrow with a new episode. So thanks again, and I will talk to you tomorrow.