Like many people, I have for years switched back and forth between numerous note-taking applications. The services and applications I've used over time include, but are not limited to:
…and many more.
For the last couple of years, I have switched back and forth heavily between Notion and Bear. I appreciate how Notion looks on the desktop and am interested in its powerful database features, but prefer the way that Bear lets me organize and reference topics. For the past few months, it's become clear to me that the winner (for me) is Bear for the forseeable future. In this post, I'm going to talk about why I enjoy taking personal notes in Bear, and what I would change if I were writing my own app, again.
The root of my note taking is a simple, mostly linear daily log. For each day, I create a new note and begin appending tasks, relevant thoughts, and relevant events to the log. Generally if I have a meeting, I won't create a new note for it, but will add notes in a nested list:
A screenshot of a daily note, with meeting notes in a nested list
There's nothing particularly novel here—I have a log per day and keep a list of notes for that day.
In order to make these daily logs easy to peruse, however, I make use of one of Bear's most powerful features, its hashtags (and particularly their ability to be nested). For each week (beginning on Monday), I use a hashtag such as #log/2020/06/29, where the final day segment is the start of the week for that log's day.
A screenshot of a daily note with the tag “#log/2020/06/29”
Although Bear can sort tags by date created or modified, I find it helpful to be able to also scope them down to a span of time that I care about.
A video showing a user filtering Bear notes by selecting various spans of time: Year, month, and week.
Since I organize my daily logs using nested tags, I can peruse them by each subsection of that tag—all logs, all logs for the given year, all logs for the given year/month, or all logs for the given year/month/week-start. I find this really helpful for focusing on specific timespans when doing things like writing my self-reviews at GitHub.