(2018-10-04) Forte The Essential Requirements For Choosing A Notes App As Your Second Brain

Tiago Forte: The Essential Requirements for Choosing a Notes (Notebook) App as Your Second Brain. I believe there are ten core capabilities

Deal breakers

1. Quick capture and editing

if you’re walking down the street and a brilliant (or wacky) idea suddenly pops into your mind, you will actually pull out your phone and capture it.

2. Scales to thousands of notes without performance lag

3. Basic formatting options

bold, italics, underline, font colors, and highlighting

recommend at least 3 distinct options that can be overlaid on top of each other

4. Strong search feature

5. Ability to handle images and attachments

images within the body of the note, not as an attachment

6. Private space, with public sharing

have a way to share those ideas as soon as they’re ready for showtime

Must-haves

7. At least 3 levels of hierarchy

In Evernote, the 3 levels are individual notes, which are contained in notebooks, which are contained in stacks

Numerous studies have shown that, despite the prevalence and effectiveness of search, people still overwhelmingly prefer to navigate through discrete containers to find their files. I believe this satisfies our sense of spatial awareness, and also provides many opportunities for serendipity

8. Many ways to capture information

Web clipper (for capturing web pages)

Email capture (a customized email address you can forward emails to to be captured)

Mobile apps

9. Native and web versions

10. Capturing and syncing across multiple devices

Nice-to-haves

12. Side-by-side viewing

11. Exportable as plain text

crucial part of using your notes to do creative work. Being able to compare and contrast two notes, and move information between them

13. Bullets or lists

14. Automatic date stamps

15. Tags