You guys know that I have always been big on rough notes and final study notes. At least, I was for a very long time, even after I left med school. I have kept all my medical school notes hoping that one day, I will go back to them to rewrite them neatly. However, as the years passed, I came to realise that I would probably never go back to them. There’s simply not enough time. Who am I kidding?
Original plan
Most of you know Noteful has been our biggest sponsor in the last couple of years. I love Noteful for two reasons: I was going to use the app anyway, but the developers still chose to support the channel. Thanks to that partnership, I thought I would finally be able to buy some time to get on with my final study notes. However, most of our interns still couldn’t work independently. I spent a lot of time coaching and checking their work to ensure we continued producing the content you guys love. Maybe I am just a terrible teacher, but that actually took more time than when I was working alone. Which meant I still had no time to write my final study notes.
When our partnership with Noteful ended, I had no interns because I now had a limited budget and couldn’t pay them. So, I went back to just me and Uncle Dan. Of which, he only focuses on Paperless Humans. If I had failed to do my final study notes with people helping out, what were the chances I would do them working alone? In my depression, I went through all the app notes I had been taking in Noteful for the past couple of years, and they are all rough notes that keep expanding and growing. I have had to keep adding more digital notebooks to my app notes, which works, but is it the best setup I can have?
Current workflow
So, for interns, we used two apps: Apple Notes if they had Apple devices or Google Docs if they didn’t. I’d still have to go back to Noteful to update the guidelines. When I took a step back to try and organise my digital life, I realised that my note-taking style had changed and I needed a new note-taking system. So, to bring some sanity into my crazy digital workflow, I have had to change a few things.
New note-taking style
I type 90% of the time and handwrite only 10%. I still handwrite to plan user guides, reviews, comparisons, and mostly my personal life with my family. I mostly type directly on our website, but also in Apple Notes, and now, without any interns, I won’t be using Google Docs for a while. The new updates to Apple Notes in iPadOS 18 made me, for the first time ever, consider adopting Apple Notes as my main note-taking app. Collapsible notes, space additions to sections, hyperlink creation, and collaboration are the main features I am switching to Apple Notes. I also love the new Maths Notes feature because I have been doing a lot of calculations lately.
I have also realised that I hardly mix handwriting with text, but there are times I do want to type notes. The feature I have disliked most about Apple Notes for years is actually the feature I need right now. Apple Notes supports body text that doesn’t overlap with your handwriting, and no other app does that. Especially because now we have functional text boxes in the app, I can still mix handwritten notes if I want to. That makes Apple Notes perfect for my scrapbooking style.
I started scrapbooking in December, but I couldn’t keep it up in Noteful because inspiration had to hit when I was close to my iPad. Otherwise, I would brush it off and then forget about it. In Apple Notes, I can type when I am outside and on the go, then handwrite when I am back at home. Also, my family is working on a number of projects, and since everyone has an Apple Device, Apple Notes made sense. Collaboration is easy, and the app is also easy to figure out, especially because I have had everyone watch the Apple Notes course we have on Paperless Humans for both the iPhone and iPad versions of the app. It’s what we’ve managed to cover so far… When so many people collaborate in a single notebook, I rely on the search tool to find most items because I am not the only one writing the notes. Noteful has a terrible search tool, which is another reason I am moving to Apple Notes.
The move
Like I did when I left Notability, my current notes in Noteful will remain there, and for a while, I will keep going back to them. But I have already started moving my scrapbook to Apple Notes. It doesn’t have a lot of pages, so it won’t be hectic. There are a couple of things I will miss in Noteful, though.
The amazing pen tools—my handwriting looks amazing in the app. Because I love the app so much, Noteful will remain my go-to app when I need neat handwritten notes. So, if by some miracle, I do find the time to do my final study notes, even in my old age, I will do them in Noteful. I am obsessed with the pen tool in Noteful, so much that moving to Apple Notes, I will only be using the pencil tool for all my handwritten notes. I have never liked the pen tool in Apple Notes, and after Noteful, no pen tool even comes close!
I will also miss the layers and how easily I could use our digital notebooks in Noteful. There is definitely a permanent place for Noteful in my heart. And no, I have not been sponsored to say that. I loved Noteful before the developers decided to support this channel, and I will continue to love it after they stopped because it is a brilliant handwriting note-taking app.
Old Bible study setup
The second part of my life that needs some organising is my Bible study setup. I am currently doing it in the Olive Tree Bible app. It has been fun since they added some text formatting options to it, but it still feels inadequate. I want something more robust that will allow me to add both text and handwritten notes. I tried moving it to Noteful a couple of months ago to take advantage of the page cropping feature. I enlarged the pages to write on the sides, but without any way of hyperlinking the notes, everything felt disconnected. I also tried doing it in LiquidText. I added different workspaces for different things, and for a while, I liked the setup. However, with the release of MarginNote 4, I couldn’t resist the flashcards I could create in the app.
Moving to MarginNote 4
I am planning to use MarginNote 4 for Bible study, and to start off that journey, I need to move all my highlights from my current Bible study app (Olive Tree Bible, which also happens to be my favourite app of all time—a story for another video). There are a lot; unfortunately, there is no shortcut to moving them. I have to move each manually, one by one. To make it easier, I planned to move them according to the different categories.
I have already added my Bibles to my Bible study set for Bible study. On my iPad, I opened the Olive Tree Bible app, where I’ll be moving information from. Two devices were a lot easier than switching between two different apps on my MacBook. A couple of minutes into this, I was already frustrated by how unstable the MacBook version of MarginNote 4 is. I tried searching to work faster, but the search engine in MarginNote 4 was really slow. This shouldn’t be happening on a MacBook.
After some time, I soldier on to create some cards to see how my highlights were looking, just in case I needed to adjust them. Initially, I planned to move all the highlights in a single day. But after just twenty highlights, I was very tired. I have hundreds of verses to transfer, and I am willing to do so, but it will take some time. Also, instead of using MarginNote 4 as my only Bible study app, I have decided to use it as a complimentary one because, at the moment, the app feels a bit unstable, and I might find myself returning to the Olive Tree Bible.
Final thoughts
So, I am now using Apple Notes instead of Noteful and Nebo. I doubt I will still need the handwriting conversion tools in Nebo with this move. MarginNote 4 now supplements my Olive Tree Bible for my Bible study sessions, and LiquidText remains my go-to research app whenever I need to research or study something. Speaking of which, we have a course for LiquidText if you want to master the app.
