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Random notes have no exploitable structure

Random notes, be it a phone number you had to write down, a photo you snapped of something interesting, the quote you wanted to remember - these things all aren't structured in a way that they lend themselves to organized storage. Therefore, if you try to do that, you are destined to fail. Most notes end up never being saved or getting file names like "notes1" or "somemorenotes." I am not sure you're going to find those again later...

But wait... they do!! We have time!

Have you ever found a photo you took on your phone by navigating to it via the map function that shows where you took the photo? Or have you scrolled through your timeline because "I know I took that picture right before Thanksgiving that year!"

Time and place are always contexts of random notes (or random photos) - although place isn't always automatically accessible by apps. But we still have time!

How to exploit time for better note taking

We can exploit time by structuring how we take and store notes differently.

Create a single note taking doc on every day where you find yourself writing down a random note

I realize this looks too simple to be true. Don't knock it till you've tried it though. It has totally changed how I take notes. And find old notes. And use old notes to be smarter today.

Nope. One note per day. That can't be all there is to it

As soon as you switch to this note taking technique, you will notice other questions popping up. Where should I put all these files? Also, that file management takes a long time... why? Why is it so hard to refer back to a previous note?

Tomorrow, I will show you how a tool switch will set you on a path to answer all of these questions and set up your note taking system for your needs!