hello everyone welcome back to the Keep Productive youtube channel today it is not me doing the
video i am passing over to my good friend scott friesen who is over at the channel simpletivity
he's going to be diving into ample note today i'm actually going to be jumping on his channel
to dive into ample note and my thoughts as well we're doing a bit of like a a channel swap for
today so um this video is going to be about ample notes which is a note taking application that has
some really cool uh features in terms of like task score has a really lightweight
frame and we're going to be going through it in a lot of detail scott's video here
today is going to explore it you can check out my opinions of it over on his channel simpletivity
which will be below so i hope you enjoy today's video a huge thanks to scott for coming on and i
look forward to some of your thoughts and opinions on apple notes in the comments below anyway guys
i'll talk to you very very soon cheerio and here's scott hello everyone scott friesen here
from simplitivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress and i'm so excited to be back
here on the keep productive channel giving you my review of ample note now just before we dive
in if you want to see francesco's take on apple note be sure to visit the simpletivity channel
for his review so let's dive in apple note is a relatively newcomer to the note-taking app space
but i really like what they are doing because the way that they are bringing notes ideas and
tasks together i think is really unique and is also really special so let me give you a quick
overview over here on the left hand side of our screen we start with something called jots we next
have notes and then finally tasks and really the idea here within apple notes is to take something
from a quick idea or maybe a brainstorming session or just something that's popped up in your head
and take it through that process of maybe fleshing it out as a note and then finally managing that
task now jots is really a place for you to grab those really super quick ideas we're not talking
about meeting notes we're talking about those things that maybe are distracting you from the
task that you're working on at hand the way that it works is that everything is listed by date so
because today is february 1st here i have my february first daily jobs and you can see some
of the previous ones as well i can always go back to previous days but the idea here is to
grab those very quick simple notes how often have you been using a note-taking app and it
is such a struggle or such an inconvenience for you to start an entirely new note and give it a
title and a name or a date and you don't even need that much right you just want to quickly get in
and out of your note-taking app so that's the great thing here with jots is just to quickly
get that information down so you can get back to what you're working on now if we come over
to notes you'll actually notice that those jots do exist here which is an important thing because
now we can take them and transform them into maybe more fully fleshed ideas right we can link to web
pages we can link to other notes right here within ample note we can start to add some rich text and
some tags and some images and all that good stuff to flesh out our notes and the thing is i can
actually come up here and rename this as well so maybe i can say these are things to think about
this week for example so here i've renamed it here if i go back to jots what you'll notice
is that now february 1st is empty remember this down below was my february first jots well that
still exists as a note but if i want to continue to add information i can do so here i think this
is really really smart because as you're adding notes throughout the day then hopefully you're
making some time to put them in a more proper place or grouping them together but now we still
have that opportunity to input more quick notes throughout the day so getting back to notes uh the
notes here within ample note have many of the same features that you may be used to when it comes to
something like evernote or perhaps notion in fact the layout is very very similar to evernote we can
have different headings we can add bullet points and again all the links and everything else that
you're used to in most note-taking application but where i think apple note really shines is the
relationship between tasks and adding those tasks within your note-taking tool so here for example
i've added a few tasks within this node and it looks pretty straightforward i've got a check
box here i've got the task written out and on the right-hand side i've got a few different options
i can actually choose to hide or snooze these tasks if i don't want them in my face or in my
team's face for a while and bring them back back at a future time i can choose a due date of course
which is going to be standard with your tasks and i can choose a priority in this case this
particular task is both urgent and important but i could just say it's one or the other but where
this really shines is if you pull this drop down menu and see all of the additional information you
can add so something that not a lot of note-taking apps will include is the ability to repeat a task
for example i can change the due date i can set a reminder let's say i want a reminder 15 minutes in
advance here's where i can set that time when if i do choose to hide this task here i can change the
priority maybe this one is only urgent and when it comes to duration this one i'm going to say is
only about 15 minutes in length now what you may be noticing is this little box here called the
task score and i really think this is brilliant and it's going to help many of you so often i
have people asking me scott what is the perfect formula as to what i should be working on next or
how do i prioritize a large number of tasks from various different projects or across my life
well what ample note is trying to do here is trying to give you a quantitative score so
that when you look at all of your tasks across all of your notes you can decide or at least
help to decide what should come before something else so here you can see if i say the due date
is tomorrow i've got a score of a but what if i say it's due today oh my goodness it's a score of
16. now be perfectly honest i'm not exactly sure what the highest number is here i haven't
seen anything above 20 i believe i'm not exactly sure how all of these calculations are working
but a lot of them make sense to me here under priority currently it's urgent but if i say
it's important and urgent it's going to tack on some more information if i take off that urgent
it actually brings it back uh drastically or by about three uh task score points or whatever
calculation is being used in this case but i think this is great because when we get to the final
section here within ample note within tasks now we are bringing in all of our tasks from multiple
locations right from multiple nodes and here you can see i've got two reds based on that task score
i've got a couple of yellows a blue and then a few other things here which really don't have a color
primarily because i haven't set a due date or given it that other information
now i'm not suggesting that you should attack your task list exactly in this order but i
think by adding this information as a part of your decision-making process can help you
at the very least if you don't want to see it in this way ample note does give you some other
ways to group these tasks together you can group them by their specific notes even though we're not
looking at the note view here you can also group them by a few other ways as well if you don't want
them necessarily by task score but one of the things that i really like is that if i don't
like the order that i see here i can adjust it so let's say i want to bring this task to the very
top and work on that first you can see that it has separated it out it's created a bit of space
so now i can focus on accomplishing this task before getting to the rest of my particular task
list now you'll also notice here on the left hand side we have a few shortcut keys and that's going
to be dependent on which view you are looking at here so under tasks we have things like do this
week and high value tasks those are the red tasks that we indicated there if we go back to notes you
can see there's some shortcuts in terms of what we should be doing today this week and things that
are archived another few things that i like about ample note here is that when it comes to images
it is very quick and easy for you to resize those images how often have you been taking a note and
you've pasted in an image and it's taking up way too much space as it pertains to the rest of your
notes in the text on your page apple note also makes it really quick and easy for you to grab
all of that text within that image this isn't necessarily something new and it's not something
that other note-taking apps can't do i just like that i don't have to click multiple times
in order to achieve it now i've got all this great text coming directly from this image last but not
least let's talk about structure and you'll notice here on the left hand side that apple note uses a
tag based system not a folder based system so you can add multiple tags up here at the top
let's say i want to add marketing tag to this particular note here but the nice feature is
that you can have nested tags or branches of your tags you'll notice here under website i have a few
things down below review and task you can see if i look at this note it's actually a website
or it's written out tag website slash review so you can nest those tags within other tags which
in many ways just replaces the need for folders in that particular case so a lot of flexibility here
within apple note as well now if you'd like to see what francesco thinks of ample note be sure
to visit the simpletivity channel for his full review thank you so much for watching today's
video and remember being productive does not need to be difficult in fact it's very simple
you