Organising Notes and Ideas

| Saskia

When I made the switch back to Windows after five years of using a Macbook Pro, one of my concerns was migrating my notes.

I have an Iphone and I had totally grown used to creating the native Notes app for anything – resulting in over 250 notes of college lectures, recipes, freelance project notes and ideas. It was a total mess.

Notes to Evernote

A small impression of the notes I made for this world I was making up in my teenage years!

Time to dig up my old Evernote account. In my teens I had made an Evernote account to organize all my story ideas, species and characters I had made up and wrote comics about. I was quite obsessive about it creating a believable world for these characters – it was quite the trip down memory lane when I first logged in after three years, haha!

I enjoyed using Evernote as it allowed me to arrange notes in different categories and assign tags to them. As I was already used to working with it (albeit a bit rusty!), it seemed the perfect solution for keeping my thoughts organised.

Problem arised: how to get my notes from Apple’s native Notes app into Evernote without having to copy and paste them all by hand?

It’s clear that Apple doesn’t want you to use ever a different program than it’s native Notes app: migrating notes to another program, especially Evernote, is a pain. I tried multiple automation scripts, but none seemed to work for me, it would export the notes as .html files full of markup, or .txt files, both which Evernote can’t import.

So, in the end, I did copy and paste all 250+ notes by hand. It took an hour or so, but at least I got them where I wanted them!

Notion.so

Now some people have recommended Notion.so – and it looks pretty amazing so far!

Having used Notion.so for a few months now, I can heartly recommend it! I use it to collect notes about every part of my business, that means notes and feedback about projects, task lists for updating Etsy and social media post planning. And not the very least: Notion does support importing notes from Evernote!

My Notion ‘opening page’, with sub pages for each project to keep track of.

I also moved my complete CRM to Notion. I used to keep track of studios and people I reached out to in Excel, and I still miss the ability to color cells conditionally as you can in excel. What I got back in exchange, however, is the posibility to link databases – and that is really Notion’s strength. I now can link companies to people, which makes it really easy to see whenever I contacted studio X and who I was in contact with, when, and what we talked about. Adding more info means of course also spending more time writing down all that data, but I still believe it helps!