Have you only used your simple Notes app for just jotting down a quick note? Or maybe Notes is your heavy hitter app that you go to all the time when you’ve got to get your thoughts down. Either way, there might be some features you didn’t know Notes was capable of, and they might help you be more efficient when using it.
Discussed In This Episode:
How Siri can help you”take a note”
This one simple step can help you collaborate
Privacy? Yes please!
Hashtags aren’t just for social media
See something on the web? Save it!
How Notes can organize your folders in a “smart” way
How you can easily find your attachments when you have a lot of notes
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Welcome coffee powered systems equipping women with actionable steps to overcome overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host. Miranda Merten. Hey, friend.
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Welcome back to Tip Tuesday, where I give you the skinny on an app or a tool that can be useful for your personal productivity. And today's tip is about the Apple Notes app for iOS. From their website it says Take note of almost anything you can find. The Apple Notes app pretty standard on any Apple phone or iPad. And you probably have seen it, maybe you've used it for jotting down some quick notes. I actually got the idea if you listen to episode 70 with Isabella Sanchez Castañeda. We talked about what she does when she needs some quick ideas for planning her content. And she said she uses the Notes app all the time. And I didn't think about using notes. I would use it just to jot down something quick. Like I said, I got to looking at it and was like, hey, you can do a lot with your notes. Not only can you do different formatting creating checklists, which I love, and adding actual tables within your notes, but there's actually a few other things that I found that were pretty cool with this little app that seems very simple. So I'm going to go through seven different things that you can do with the Notes app that you may or may not know that you can do with it, or maybe you knew about it but kind of forgot.
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So the first one is use Siri to dictate your notes. So if you have Siri, you can either press the button or just say hey Siri. You say, hey, siri, take a note. And she will say, what do you want it to say? And you can dictate your note to her when you are done. It saves your note as a separate note in your app. If you are someone who does not like to type a lot, that might be a very good option for you. The second feature is to share a note or a folder. Now, when you're in a Note, there are three menu dots at the very top right. And once you click that, you'll see a menu pop open and there's a Share option. So you tap the Share Note button from that toolbar and you can share a note two ways. You can either send a copy of the note which sends it to someone that's cool if you just want them to get a copy, you don't want them on your original note to see changes, anything like that, or you can send it as an invite to come into your note and use it.
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And you can change the features on that as well, where they can either just view the note or they can also edit and collaborate it. So think about if you wanted to do a grocery list with a partner and you want to have a running grocery list that you both can edit and it's pretty simple and intuitive. Also you can invite other people, you can let them invite other people to that note. So think if you want to do something collaborative, maybe you're having a pot luck and you want everyone to just write on the note what they're going to bring to the potluck. That's a super cool way to use that as well. Number three, you can lock your notes if you've got something you don't want people to see, maybe you are using your password manager as your notes. You can actually put a lock on each note separately. So not even locking down your entire notes app, you can protect it using either a password Touch ID or Face ID. So again, after you open the note, you want to tap on that Share button or that Ellipsis menu and select Lock Note.
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They're going to ask you to enter the passcode and then you'll be prompted if you wanted to use Touch ID or Face ID with it. If you have that set up on your phone, just make sure you remember the password. Maybe you want to make it like your master password that you use top level for everything or make it something that you can really easily remember. Number four, you can save websites and links. So if you are on a website, say you're on Chrome or Safari, you can click that Share button on your website browser and your Notes app will be an option that you can share it to. Now if it's not an option, there should be more and you can add that app to your list of things that you can share because they do give you an option to add apps onto your Share list. You can make that one of the permanent options if that's something you want to do more often. But once you share that to your note, it will actually show up as a thumbnail within the note. It'll open it up and ask you to add text to the note.
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You can put your descriptions and it's a really good way to just clip websites and it's kind of like clipping websites with Evernote. Number five, you can use hashtags to organize your notes. So if you add a hashtag and a keyword within each note, those notes will be grouped by hashtag on your notes home page. So for instance, say you found a really great recipe for blueberry pancakes. You put blueberry pancakes as the title and the next line or whoever you put #recipes or #breakfast. And then whenever you go out to the front of your home notes, you'll see that your hashtags are now listed as tags. When you click on that, any note with that tag will be pulled up. So I know a lot of people that have hundreds of Notes. Once you get to a lot of Notes, these come in super handy. You don't have to worry about sifting through everything or even going through your folders. If you tag them correctly, that could be a game changer for you. Number six along those lines, you can create smart folders. Now, you probably know that you can create your own folders for organizations.
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You are using it for business, and you want a content creation folder, social media, email marketing, and you want to just folder those all together. You can create those manually, but you have an option to do smart folders. Now, smart folders will automatically sort things together based on those hashtags. So if I had a recipe hashtag or a social media hashtag, my Notes apple automatically group those together into its own smart folder. So that can save you some time trying to figure out how you want to create folders and organize them. And the last tip on how to use your Notes app number seven is View All Attachments. Again, if you go within your Notes folder, you will see a menu at the top. You click that toolbar menu and there is an option to say View All Attachments. Sometimes if you've uploaded a photo or a file, a scan, and you don't remember exactly which note it's in, or you've got tons of folders, you can actually just view all attachments and look at exactly what you have in there. I have a scan of my driver's license, some recipe downloads on there, and if I go into View All attachments, I can see the pictures and it makes it a lot easier to find the exact Note I was looking for.
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Rather than sifting through the folders or sifting through the hashtags, looking at the picture makes it super easy. So those are seven different ways that you can use your iOS Notice app. Let me know if you learned anything new. Have you been using all of these different ways? Or did you pick something up and maybe you'll start using your Notes app a little more? That is all I have today. I will see you next time.
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Thanks for listening to coffee powered systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the Show Notes or on the website at mirandamerten.com. If you enjoyed this episode and would love to continue mastering your workflows and processes, subscribe on your favorite podcast player and join me here next time.
