In my last How I Work post, I was much enamored with Bullet Journaling – or BuJo for short – for note capture. As a recap, I had never used a note-taking system that worked the way my brain did, and as such, nothing ever stuck until Bullet Journaling. Its solid, simple, flexible capture that just works. How to organize and track for retrieval after the fact I never got the hang of, so my system ended up being easy-in, serial page-flipping search to get anything out. Still, it was an major improvement from living in my head.
GoodNotes – Redefining Capture
My wife Susie turned me on to an iPad journaling app that she’d found through her Life Coach School and NoBS coaching communities called GoodNotes. GoodNotes is much like a paper journal in that you’re capturing notes and sketches, but rather that ink on paper, the app captures into digital ink. One of the fantastic features was being able to use PDF templates for pages. I had an effective Daily template that had some standard gratitude and goals questions that I found helpful to start the day with – many thanks to Robert Terekedis for his [article on effective Digital Bujo]) https://blog.euc-rt.me/2020-03-06-organizing-adapted-digital-bullet-journal-ipad-goodnotes/#gsc.tab=0). Robert’s work was a helpful foundation to get me started. Moving to GoodNotes on the iPad with Apple Pencil was a solid upgrade.
Feature Rundown
- Capture of text was equally as good as the paper Bujo.
- Having easy access to more (digital) ink colors and line widths was a plus
- Erasing easily was a huge plus
- Copy and paste of inked text was fantastic for rearranging a day’s notes and for daily and monthly migrations. With a paper Bujo, rewriting everything at the first of a new month as part of migration always struck me as more hassle than benefit. With GoodNotes, it’s lasso/copy/paste and you’re done. That made migrations much easier.
- Pasting pictures was very helpful. Often, after I’d captured notes from a meeting, I’d go back on the Mac GoodNotes client and paste in useful images and screencaps from the meeting. It was super useful to have notes and images together – not easily doable with the paper BuJo.
- One of the big expected benefits I was looking forward to with GoodNotes was Search. Since GN converts inked writing to text behind the scenes, it’s all searchable. Unfortunately, the search is disappointingly basic. Sure, you could find the word "lasagne", and it’d show you all occurrences of that word, but you couldn’t search for "lasagne AND vegetable" to find those words on the same page, or "lasagne AND date in JAN2022" to find pages within date ranges. The final disappointment with search was a lack of hashtag searching. I tried tagging my notes with #ALMOND, and it wouldn’t search for the hash symbol – it just ignored it, making hashtagging notes not so useful.
The Verdict
The final verdict: good for capture, but not for long-term storage and retrieval. In my next How Do I Work post, I’ll cover what came next: Obsidian, and cover the GoodNotes feature that made the transition relatively painless.