The iPhone’s Notes App Is the Purest Reflection of Our Messy Existence

My reason is existential. By writing the things that pop into my head down into my notebook, I teach my brain that those ideas - my ideas - are worthy of being written down at all.

Each note becomes another brick of the house I’m building, a monument to a simple yet elusive truth: that what I notice is worth noticing.

Note-taking apps, simply put, are our best option for “bending” productivity to the ebb and flow of our days, and for managing the work-in-process inventory of ideas that represents our main asset as knowledge workers.

The most underrated note taking app is still the photo album. I can instantly recall what I was doing weeks or years ago. A single picture evokes a dozen slumbering thoughts.

And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talk ing here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consump tion, a structural conceit for binding together a series of grace... See more