Kept vs Apple Notes

Notes is the notes app in the iPhone User Guide, and it is where most people who keep notes about friends already keep them: one note per person, or one long list.

Apple’s guide lists what it does. You can create and format notes, record and transcribe audio, add photos and video, scan text and documents, organise with tags and Smart Folders, lock notes, and share and collaborate on them.

It is a general-purpose tool and a good one. Nothing in it is about people in particular, which is both why it works for this and why it stops working.

A note in Notes is exactly as useful as your memory of having written it. That is fine for a shopping list, which you open in the shop. It fails for "her interview is Thursday", because nothing about Thursday morning sends you to the note.

That is the gap between remembering a thing and remembering to look it up. Deciding in advance when and where you will do something has a medium-to-large effect on whether you do it, and a detail that arrives on the right morning is that plan made for you. A note in a folder is the intention without the plan.

The other difference is upkeep. One note per person works for five people. At twenty you are maintaining a filing system, and a conversation that mentioned three of them has to be written three times.