Sort Notes by Type
Your notes app is a single endless pile — meeting scraps, book highlights, brilliant 2 a.m. ideas, and grocery lists all jumbled together, so finding anything means scrolling through everything. The fix is not more folders; it is sorting by what the note is for. A handful of buckets based on the note's job — not its topic — turns the pile into a system you can actually trust.
TL;DR / Quick Fix
Quick fix: sort notes by what they are for, not where they came from — try four buckets: fleeting scratch, literature from reading, permanent ideas, and active projects. File each note once when captured, review the fleeting pile weekly, and promote keepers upward. Fewer buckets beat a perfect taxonomy.
Follow these steps
- Learn the four buckets. Fleeting: scratch, temporary, inbox — stuff with a short half-life. Literature: notes from reading, distilled in your words. Permanent: your own ideas, cleaned up. Projects: notes serving active work. Four buckets cover nearly everything.
- Sort by job, not topic. A note about batteries could be fleeting (a shopping reminder), literature (from an article), or permanent (your comparison insight) — the same topic lands in different buckets by purpose. Topic-sorting creates fifty folders; job-sorting needs four.
- File once, at capture. The moment you write a note, drop it in its bucket — ten seconds now beats an hour of sorting later. Unfiled notes go to fleeting by default; the weekly review sorts the strays.
- Review fleeting weekly. Once a week, sweep the fleeting pile: delete the dead, promote the keepers to literature or permanent, move project bits to projects. This review is the engine — without it the buckets rot.
- Promote, do not duplicate. When a fleeting note proves valuable, move it up — do not copy it. One note, one home, promoted through the ranks. Duplicates are how piles reproduce.
- Connect it to a bigger method. These buckets are the sorting layer inside systems like PARA and the Zettelkasten — learn one full note-taking method and the buckets become its filing system.
What NOT to do
- Do not create twenty buckets. Four is the point — every extra bucket is a decision you will dodge, and dodged decisions become the pile again.
- Do not sort by topic. Fifty topic folders feel organized and function as fifty junk drawers; purpose-based buckets stay usable.
- Do not skip the weekly review. Buckets without review are just four piles instead of one — the review is the system.
- Do not file and forget permanently. Even permanent notes deserve an occasional reread; ideas you never revisit might as well not exist.
Frequently asked questions
What about notes that fit two buckets?
Pick the primary job and file it there — then link or tag the secondary. One home, with pointers, beats two copies.
Should I sort old notes retroactively?
Only the obviously valuable ones. Archive the ancient pile as-is and start the system fresh — retroactive sorting is where good intentions go to die.
Paper notebooks — how do buckets work?
Dedicate notebook sections or use one notebook per bucket for active ones, and index the rest. Or go digital for anything you need to search — be honest about which you will maintain.