10 BEST Ways how to Organise your Notes in macOS Sequoia

• Managing notes effectively can be challenging, but there are several techniques to help.
• Organizing notes into folders and using tags provides structure and easy access.
• Smart folders and linking notes enhance navigation within your notes app.
• Consolidating notes into one and utilizing headings improves organization.
• Sorting options help maintain order in your notes.

I had nearly 400 notes and they kept on piling up. I couldn't get on top of it until I tried all of these techniques which I will show you in this video.

I will start with some obvious things like creating folders like using tags, but further on we will get into more exciting stuff like creating smart folders in notes, linking from OneNote to another, or the way how to consolidate many notes into one using the new macOS features.

So let's start by opening the Notes app. The first and the most obvious way, how you already see in the sidebar is that you can create multiple folders and you can easily do that if you right click the sidebar here and select Create new folder.

You can also use the same shortcut as you are using in Finder: Shift + Command + N.

I will call this folder SEOIAURS because here, as an example, I have many notes with the scripts for recording for that course. Now I can hold the command key and select all of the notes which belong in this folder.

Once I have them all selected, I will simply drag and drop them into that folder. Let's open up the folder now. There are still quite a lot of notes in the list, so I can go a little bit further and create more folders, and I can turn these folders into subfolders.

In this example, I can create different folders for different sections of the course, so I will split these notes nicely in there.

I will actually do it on a time lapse in the background, so I will not waste a lot of time with it. You can use the spare time to click the like on this video or to subscribe to see these new tips every week.

Anyway, all of these notes are already sorted, but I'm still left with this one. It's the whole course outline which doesn't belong into any of these folders, and it is a note I will be opening many times, so it makes sense to have quick access to it.

For this purpose, I can actually pin it on top, and it's as easy as just right-clicking the note and select Pin the note here. So now it will always be on top of the list.

So far we have just split the notes into different folders, but now I will show you a proper way to better organize the notes for real, and that is by using tags.

You can create a tag from any part of text just by adding the hashtag in front of it, but to give it a better structure, I recommend to write all of the tags in one line at the beginning or end of the note.

So let's type here tags and type all of the tags. This script belongs to the introduction, so I will type #section1, and once I press the spacebar, it will turn it into a tag. Now I can copy the whole line and put it in another note which is also part of section one and go to the next one.

If this one is already the other one, I can retype it as #section2 and I can go on and on. The advantage of this recording is that I can just do like this, and now all the notes have their own tags so I can reveal it down there in the sidebar.

Now by just clicking on any of these tags, I can simply jump to different sections of the course and separate the notes nicely.

But once I'm done with recording any of these scripts, I can add another tag to them saying completed.

Thanks to that, I can use something called negative tags, so I can go back to the tags and click on section two to filter only the notes from the selected section.

Now I will click on the new tag completed as well, which will show me only the completed scripts from this section. But if I click on it one more time, it will actually cross it away. It will negate the tag, which means it's going to show me only the videos in this section that I have not completed yet.

By the way, these examples are not just random. I am already working on the complete macOS course which will be released in a couple of weeks. The previous one was on top of the list in its category and this one will just be a step one level higher. So if you want to be informed about it, then check out the official website or subscribe to the channel because I'll tell you more about it later and also bring you some special release coupons.

But back to the notes because I want to show you some more things. One of them is achieving basically the same thing as we did with the negative tags. Now it is connected to smart folders.

You can create a smart folder exactly the same way as you create a normal folder from the right-click menu or using the shortcut. The only thing you need to do now is to click on this one to turn it into the smart folder, which will expand the view giving you access to filter the folder by the tags you have created.

I will call this folder Current recordings and I will include sections of the course in this folder and I will also add this completed one. Actually, I will click on it once more and exclude it.

So now I'll have quick access to all of the filtered notes excluding those finished scripts. If I change any tag in any node, it will automatically update in this folder as well.

Now let's try something else. If you have many notes which are connected to the same topic, you can actually link them to one another to quickly jump between them.

For example, at the end of this script, I am already mentioning that the next video will be about Apple menu. So I can actually link to that to jump into the next note straight away once I finish this one.

You can add a link to a note in various ways, but I prefer the right-click menu. I'll find it right on top of this context menu. Now I can type the name of the node I want to link to.

There is also one more special way to add a link, and that is to use the greater than symbol on my keyboard. It is under option and period key, but it might be different on yours.

To find out about the symbols on your keyboard, just click on the language keyboard in the menu bar and select Show Keyboard Viewer.

Now, thanks to this, you can easily find out how to type this greater than symbol. So go back to the node and type the symbol one more time and then it will open up this menu from where you can select the note.

But we can take this whole concept a little bit further and create some sort of start page or outline page which will only serve the purpose of linking to the other notes.

So in my example, I can go to the outline and here select all of these headings and turn them into links to the specific scripts. But you can easily do it with any of your notes. You can create a note which will be kind of a table of contents of all of the notes you have there.

From there you can link to all the other notes. And this one, this table of content, you just pin on top to be always accessible.

But to actually reduce the number of notes, you can consolidate them. I don't think I have ever used this before, but it's really fitting here. That means putting more notes into one note.

I can just double click any note to open it in a separate window and I can do it for all the notes from one section. So this note I will choose to be the main one. I will rename it as Section 3: Default Elements, so that's the title of this note.

I'll type it on top and this will become my consolidated note. Now I'll go to the other one, select all, and press Command + X to cut the text away, which I can then paste into the consolidated note.

The advantage of clicking this Command + X to cut the text is that the note will become empty and it will be automatically deleted. So I don't need to bother with it anymore afterwards.

Now I have created one very long note which consists of all of the scripts from one section. It seems that the things just got worse now and I don't have it organized at all.

But here comes the time I can use the new features which allow me to collapse the text into separate headings. Let me show you how to do it.

I can select this title and change it into the heading style and I can do it with all of the other script headings which I have combined into this one note.

Now this small arrow will appear, so I can click on it and collapse the whole script into this one line. Thanks to that, I can reduce the number of notes, but I am still able to easily navigate into this one note.

And now we are getting to my last tip which is about sorting. By default, the notes app will always sort everything by the last date edited, but sometimes you just scroll through the notes and you accidentally click on it and the notes app will consider that as your changes and it will put it on top even though you didn't want it.

But if you go to the View menu in the menu bar, you have a few options here for sorting. First of all, you can sort it by title, but I don't find it very useful because you are usually not sorting your notes alphabetically.

You still need them to be sorted by date, but a good option would be to switch them into date created, which means that they will always stay in their spot where they were created. Even if I go to the note and make some changes, it will still stay down there in the list.

It was quite a specific example with these scripts, but I believe you can take some of these techniques into your notes app and organize them in a better way.

Anyway, thanks for watching and if you want to see more tips, make sure to subscribe. In that case, I'll see you in the next video.