The failure of taking notes
Everyone knows, if there’s something you don’t want to forget, you write it down somewhere. When you have more things to remember, you start to need a tool to write things more easily, then you get notebooks. And when thing keeps growing, it’s easy to become messy, then you start to organize the notes, which is time-consuming and you have to do it repeatedly once in a while, so you want it to be automatic, and among all those things you have written down, it’s also difficult to know where to find, when to continue, which should do first, what you have left behind, to know those things, you need another notebook for that, and finally, all the efforts are too hard to maintain and the notes will be abandoned.
Manage your knowledge
The reason the notes fail to work is not about notes, they have great value, what fails is lacking efficient ways to connect and keep organizing the contents of them, knowledge itself is useless unless then can be easily found, updated, and extended when they needed.
A flow to run your thoughts
Think about this, what if there is an assistant, who knows everything in your notes, whatever you want to do, you can just ask him to get it for you, if something you don’t remember, you ask him, when want to pick up the work you left earlier, he brings to you, knowing which one is more important when you have an idea, just talk to him know, then ask him later, tell him to organize the contents of notes from time to time, all those things working together, becomes a system, and to summarize it to a simple pattern of managing your knowledge, that’s the flow I want to introduce to you, a pattern to maintain your knowledge in the form of notes.
In this flow, things can be categorized into 3 parts: Materials Tasks and Editing
- Materials
Everything in your notes begins with a simple idea, which can be from anywhere, in any form.
- Tasks
Time is a line, but life is not. You don’t work on one note, finish it, and never open it again, instead, you normally make a plan, add something here, and they do it another time.
- Editing
Everything will be in the form of notes, and notes live inside a text editor. What’s important is, the editor has to work well with the other two parts, otherwise, there’s no fundamental difference with just a text editor.
Each of the three parts has its own purpose, working in different scenarios, also working together to complete the whole process.
Materials inventory
A place to keep everything that not yet put into any note, which can be anything, maybe a picture you find interesting in another app, a movie clip, some wise words, a place you want to remember, or simply something you tall to yourself, the key to this inventory is to hold anything that might be valuable, to achieve that, it must be:
- Able to keep as many types of information as possible
- Add new items as easy as possible
- Support as many methods to add new items as possible
With this in mind, Nebula has designed to simplify every possible way to be able to gather information and keep them from the beginning.
In order to keep ideas more easy and thorough, Nebula now supports image, audio, video, sketch, link, text, location as a data source, and will extend for more.
To catch ideas, you can directly use the function build-in for each type of source, and also can easily share from other apps, like system album, any browser you like, audio and video app, indeed any app that can share its content, even take a screenshot, can be easily shared to Nebula.
Inside Nebula, they are categorized by type, ordered by date to help you check your new ideas. By checking those newly gathered materials period will be a very good chance to refresh memory and organize the work.
A great way of collecting materials in Nebula is by capture from other apps, any app that shares almost anything can be captured by Nebula
Task management
As we discussed earlier, normally you get things planed, and then just move forward nice and easy.
The good thing is, in Nebula making a plan is rooted inside your note’s content, so you don’t have to do it on purpose. There are many tools that work together to help you manage your task progress, Agenda to show you the arrangements by considering the status, time, and priority, Kanban to manage the whole picture of the current tasks, and Agenda Shortcut let you focus on one group of tasks. With a deep understanding of your contents, all those tools are working automatically, you just write you things in your note, and they will do the rest, how good is that!
Nebula text editor
We have materials and task management nicely handled, finally the most important part, the text editor. Nebula has an editor that has many great features to help you be more expressive, more comfortable.
The editor organizes paragraphs as Outlines, which helps you understand the hierarchy of your document better, every paragraph is foldable and nestable, with handy functions such as Fold others, even very large documents still very efficient. Attachments enrich the depth of a note greatly, so Nebula tried very hard to support as many kinds of them as possible, image, audio, video, links, map locations, sketches all can be inserted and work directly inside the editor. With text-decoration give your contents more character, a list, and a check box provide more ways to organize the contents, and a Double-side document link connects your documents together like the way your brain works, once a link is created, it works both ways. Nebula goes one step further than normal document links, you can even link to a paragraph. Nebula guarantees the link will not break if you changed the name of the document or the paragraph, or move them around.
In the end
I used to take notes a lot, but they soon out of control, I really hope Nebula can help you, like it has helped me, getting my note so organized, and more importantly, help me happily and easily build and maintain my personal knowledge center.
More information about Nebula
