2019 reflection question

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 7, 2020 at 03:10 PM

Yes, I know exactly what you mean. But NotePlan has evolved in ways that mean your problem can be solved relatively easily. Depending, of course, on precisely how you use NotePlan.

The solution I would propose is tagging. NotePlan now supports nested tags, which it handles in exactly the same way as Bear. This means that at various levels of a tag hierarchy, you can view all the entries on lower/inferior levels of the hierarchy. There are many ways you could use this to keep close track of notes, whether they’re in the Notes or Calendar component; the wonderful thing about NotePlan is that it doesn’t differentiate between the two. If you have a tag like, say, #marketing/meeting2019-11, you can use that in a Note that summarises the agenda and outcome of the meeting, but also in the Calendar note for a specific day on which that meeting was held.

You could also use the tagging system to keep more precise track of stuff by date, so e.g. #marketing/meeting/2019/11/12 - this would produce much the same effect as Agenda.

NotePlan also supports smart searches, in much the same way as Agenda. So you can put together smart filters and then save them as custom searches. This is another way to optimise your use of NotePlan - by creating smart searches that key to particular date ranges, for example, or limiting searches to one or more of Notes, Calendar, Events or Reminders. This feature is enormously promising. It’s still not as sophisticated as the Agenda equivalent, but it’s already powerful.

Personally, I use a combination of all these methods to keep track of stuff. With one caveat: I rarely put valuable information in the notes for individual Calendar days (except for my general journal). I store valuable information in the Notes section, then add tasks (with scheduled dates) in the relevant Notes so that they show up in the Calendar. This means I can keep extensive notes on major projects (if they’re very, very extensive notes I happily create more notes with wiki-links and tags, so I can swap from one note to another at high speed) in a single repository.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that you can use external search engines or even text/markdown editors to manipulate NotePlan files, which are simply text files held in ordered folders. In this sense, NotePlan is vastly superior to Agenda (and much, much faster - although it doesn’t yet support images). Another point of superiority is that you can open individual NotePlan notes in separate windows, which despite many, many user requests, Agenda is still unable to do.

Finally, NotePlan’s excellent search engine means that I’ve stopped worrying about losing stuff in there. I can usually find it if I need it. But I hope the above ideas are helpful if you want to take a more structured approach to your personal knowledge management!

Cheers,
Bill