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Hello! 👋

I am an Apple Productivity stan. I use Notes, Reminders, Calendar, Mail and Freeform.

These power my YouTube channel, my side-business and most things in my personal life.

I'd love to find ways to make Apple Notes slightly more visual to help with how my brain processes information best.

Look forward to the support to keep me from switching to the tool that shall not be named(Notion).

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  • 4 comments

Chris Plonski

Welcome, William McLean !

So good to see you here. 🙌

Love your setup — and the fact that you’re using the native tools not just privately, but also for your YouTube and side business is super inspiring. 🔥

When you say you’d love to make Apple Notes more visual — do you mean things like banners, icons, and formatting, or more in terms of tool structure and layout?

Curious how your brain likes to process info visually — always looking for ideas to enhance that side of Notes. 🧠✨

William McLean

Chris Plonski The thing that entices me about Notion, Craft or Obsidian which all have database views now is the fact that I could see everything that I'm working on for the channel in one view, automatically.

The downside of all three for me at the moment is I don't like how tasks are implemented.

I much prefer using Apple Reminders for tasks and linking my Apple Notes, but it creates a manual process.

I've tried extra tags previously in Apple Notes like #idea and #working along with smart folders, but it also adds complexity. I know this is probably a minor nit to most, I just can't seem to figure out if it is a me problem, a tool problem, or time to switch some portion of my workflow to a different tool.

I'm really cautious about having too many tools and too much stuff fragmented around.

Chris Plonski

Totally feel you, William McLean,

I went through the exact same loop.

At some point, I just made peace with the fact that some things being manual isn’t a weakness — it’s a feature.

We live in a time where everything tries to be automated, connected, optimized…

But there’s something really grounding about seeing things move by hand — physically dragging a Reminder, rewriting a Note, deciding where it lives. It feels “analog”. I now treat these “manual” steps as moments of clarity, not inefficiency.

Thanks for sharing this. 🙏

Chris Plonski

William McLean BTW: Anyhow I would love to see some more option for “views”. 🤭