Last month, I incorporated Twos into my workflow. It’s a great to-do app but I realized I needed a little more versatility in my workflow. One of the big strengths of Twos is that I have a clean sheet every day and I can do weekly reviews pretty easily. I dont have to worry about a long sheet of todos piling up. It’s much easier to navigate than my long overdue list in Todoist app.

However, I found myself wanting a bit more; something that could also cover long-form writing and potentially photos if I’m at a conference.

Enter Noteplan.

Noteplan strikes the perfect balance between to-do app and second brain. I’ve added the iOS app to my homescreen and it opens straight to the daily note where I can jot down whatever is on my mind, a note, a to-do, a file, link, or image. From there I can edit in the desktop app. When I get to my computer I review all the notes. I file them away in specific folder with backlinks or drag-and-drop or check them off and mark them as complete. Some notes will get assigned to specific days of the week; other text I’ll move to a working document on a specific topic or project. This helps a lot when working on multiple projects because I can just up the document assigned to that project and see what I need to do or the most recent text I need to incorporate.

The calendar in the top-right corner shades the days where I still have remaining tasks so I can quickly do a weekly review and decide what needs to be brought forward and what I can leave alone. I can add date and time notifications to tasks so the reminders pop up on my desktop or phone. The real beauty is that I can just convert old tasks to bullets and then they don’t disappear but they also don’t nag me to keep revisiting them. It helps for those things I’ll get to “one-day” but never seem to have time for.

Noteplan supports templates and it includes a user community of plugins. From the outset, it’s designed for the P.A.R.A method of notemaking but I prefered to create my own files strcuture. One of the required plugins is the dashboard feature. It pulls all of the to-dos, regardless of date and location.

The application is snappy! The speed of search, filters, and syncing is so good I didn’t even notice it.

I suggest you play around with it a bit and watch some videos on how people are using it. The team at Noteplan is constantly updating the app with new features, so subscribe to their YouTube or Reddit channels (r/noteplanapp) is you’re interested.

Lastly, pricing. Noteplan is a part of the SetApp subscription and honestly I think everyone should have a Setapp subscription at this point. Between my daily use of Spark Mail, Bartender, Craft, Hookmark, and CleanMyMac X, this subscription more than pays for itself. If you want to pay for it separately, it’s $99 a year.

I still keep certain parts of my life separate. My journal is in Joplin – because I don’t want my journal notes to get mixed up with work – and Obsidian is still my second brain for academic journals and books but everything else is getting thrown into Noteplan.