Folders vs Tags and my hesitations :)

LBC2000

I love the idea of this. My only hesitation is this. My folders - which are topics/collections/subject areas have a lot of notes. When using individual notes that are embedded in folders, I can tag each note if needed to drill down beyond the folder title (or horizontally rather than vertically). But if I switch to this method (which I really want to try), I'd have longer notes (because I'd combine info - things would be less discrete units of info - to make linking to the home note make sense. It's the only way I see for the home note not to have billions of notes in it. In those longer notes, will it be hard to find the detail I'm seeking? What are your thoughts?

joaoalm

LBC2000 I’m not sure I understood your predicament. I just wanted to add that there is a search function within a note (on iOS tap on the 3 dots (upper right corner, then “Find in Note”).

James-Ashby

LBC2000

You can convert an existing folder to a Smart Folder specifying the tag{s} you want to filter on. Upon conversion the notes in the old folder will have the specified tags added. The notes with the added tags will be moved to the main Notes folder. You can retain or delete the SmartFolder depending on your needs.

HuJack

LBC2000

I actually has 5 top level notes.

They are: Home, Workspace, Gym, Academy, and Clinic.

I then link my major hubs under each area to them, including smart folders links from Apple Shortcuts.

I do not link everything to the top level notes.

LBC2000

Let me explain better with more details. I teach a lot of separate courses. So for example, now, I have a folder for each class and then individual notes for resources (articles, my notes from a past course, assignments) within each class. I don't love this system because lots of the resources can be used in more than one course.

But - if I were to switch to the Forever Notes system, I'm not going to want to link all of those individual notes to the home note - it will just be too long. So I was thinking I could make more general notes called courseresources, *courseevlauations, etc and link those to the home note. But then that note will be so chock full of links that it will be hard to find things (?).

So my question maybe is how does this system mesh with the zettlekasten idea of having discrete notes.

joaoalm

LBC2000

If several resources fit into different classes, you’d probably benefit from tags.
Without taking a deeper look into your existing structure, I wouldn’t say you don’t need to change it. It seems you already have something that works and just want to optimize it (example: having the same note - with common resources - on several courses), instead of changing the whole structure (creating those new general notes).

Here’s what I would do:

automatically convert your existing folders into smart tags - keeping your current structure
on notes with common resources: add tags to all the matching courses - this way, when you navigate to the (smart) folder for the course A, alongside their own notes you also see a PDF that was originally thought for course B
depending on the number of courses and personal preferences, on the ✱ Home I’d link (via Shortcuts) to each Smart Folder or I’d link to a new note (called for example All Courses), where I’d list all the courses you have - with the appropriate link to their Smart Folder.

If you’re interested in linking to smart folders, I previously shared how to do it here.

Zach

My big thing about using folders as it makes it easy to share items

joaoalm

Zach
You can have notes stored on a folder AND tag them (which means they also appear on one or several smart folders).
For example: I share a folder with my wife. Notes about common projects (kids, renovations, etc) are moved to this folder; but because these notes are also tagged, they also appear in the appropriate ✱ Collection aka smart folders.

James-Ashby

My description of what happens when you convert a folder to a smart folder was not correct. Upon conversion all the notes in the folder are tagged with the name of the folder and then moved to the main Notes folder.

AnneVoss

As said in this thread before, you can do both folders and tags.

Personally I always tag a note with all the appropriate tags. Then at some point, usually the end of the day, I run a shortcut that moves all the notes with tag X to folder X (repeat for as many tags/folders required). [Note: due to current limitations in Apple Shortcuts, I have a seperate shortcut for each tag/folder pair and one shortcut that runs all of those].

This keeps my Notes folder tidy.

For example work related notes get tagged '#work' and I use the shortcut to move those into the Work folder. All those notes ALSO get tagged with tags like #client1 #client2 #projectA etc. But I DON'T subdivide into more folders.