Live Notes and Archives

Suppose every year I plan a birthday party for my good friend, Jean Petite.

I have separate notes containing lists of presents, guests, food and drink, entertainment and so on.  I also have one master note named Project: Jean Petite Birthday 2022.  All the notes are tagged jpbirthday so I can find them quickly.

The party is a success. Even so, I create a new note outlining what went wells and even better ifs that I can refer to when planning next year’s party.

What happens when next year comes around?  Do I create new notes or use old ones? 

Some notes such as guests will just need to be modified, but others like food and drink may have to be done from scratch. I’ll probably want to create a new note for presents, but retain the old note so I don’t buy the same gift twice.

How do I stop the current notes getting mixed up with the old ones?

One way is to tag the notes by year: 2020, 2021, 2022 and then just filter to this year’s party.

Here’s a better way.

Create the following notebooks (the numbers are there so they appear in the correct order in the sidebar)

Put this year’s party notes in the In Progress Notebook. Put previous years’ notes in the Done Notebook.  Put reference notes, notes that don’t really change from year to year, in the cabinet.

That way if you want to see this years notes, just filter to In Progress and jpbirthday.  To see only reference notes, filter to Cabinet and jpbirthday.  To see everything, just filter to jpbirthday

The system makes use of the fact that a note can only be in one notebook at a time. Notes can be Todo or In Progress, but never both at the same time. 

A lot of people recommend using tags to represent these states, I think they’re wrong.  I’ve written about that here: You’re Using Folders and Tags the Wrong Way Round

Two more things about this system.

The filtered notes widget works really well with this system.  You can use them to see this year’s party notes at a glance.

And lastly, I used to have a separate Archive Notebook for old notes.  This is no longer needed, they all just go in the Cabinet

Stop tagging your notes with todo and done. Use notebooks.