Turning notes into things that happen

Why notes die

Use any note app for a few years and it reaches the same state: hundreds of notes, maybe ten of which you ever opened again. The easier saving gets, the wider that gap grows. The bottleneck is not input — it is the exit.

There are only two exits. Time can carry a note out: the appointment inside it surfaces in a calendar, an alarm goes off. Or links can carry it out: you stumble back into it while looking for something related. Noti builds both.

Pulling items out of a note

When a note contains a time cue, an event suggestion appears. One confirmation creates the event, and the original note stays on as its parent. Open the event later and you can see which note it came from.

Tasks and alarms work the same way. Pull action items out of a meeting note as tasks; set an alarm the night before if something needs preparing. All three remember their parent note, so context is never lost.

Deleting a parent note asks whether the linked items should go too. Turn that off and only the note is removed — the events and tasks survive. Cleaning up a meeting note while keeping what came out of it is a real and common case.

Linking notes together

The second exit is linking. Wrap another note's name in double brackets and the target automatically gains a backlink. "Notes that point here" collects underneath, so either side finds the other later.

Tags do the same job from a different angle. A folder gives a note exactly one home; tags and links give it several — and in practice the ones you actually rediscover are the linked ones.

As notes accumulate you can view the connections as a graph: which topics have clustered, and which notes are stranded with nothing pointing at them.

The daily note loop

The simplest workflow that survives long-term is one note per day holding everything that arrived that day. No filing decisions, so capture stays fast, and "when was that" becomes a workable way to search.

From each day's note, lines with time cues become events and action lines become tasks. Everything else stays put — most notes have nothing to extract, and that is fine.

Skim the week's daily notes once a week and promote only what survived into topic notes. Filing drops to about ten minutes a week.

Bringing notes in from another app

If notes already live somewhere else, bring them in as Markdown files. Most note apps export Markdown, so exported files come straight across. Noti exports Markdown too, which means you are never locked in.

Step-by-step instructions per app are in the migration guides below.