How I organize my life with Simplenote

I meant to blog about something geeky and exciting. After starting to re–organize my slew of notes in Simplenote¹, I decided to write about this instead.

Let’s call this a very tiny weekly review. 😉

(No, come back! Phew. Thank you.)

Simplenote feels like the perfect fit, and it doesn’t hurt that the guys that started it are super rad. (Hi Mike and Fred!)

So, I love the speed and flexibility of plain text, as well as Markdown. I’m also really glad WordPress.com finally supports Markdown, too.

Here are a few ideas on how I use Simplenote:

• Agenda notes for coworkers, family, friends.
• Tasks (personal or shared).
• Blog post drafts.
• Inventory.
• Tracking data that doesn’t need to be displayed in pretty graphs.
• Health notes, so you can discuss issues to your doctor, dentist, or optometrist with a shred confidence.
• Restaurants. (A whitelist. These dishes are delectable! Or, a blacklist. That place was not good.)
• Business hours of places you frequent (e.g. stores, malls, mechanic).
• Late–night sparks of inspiration.

I also love how you can use other apps with Simplenote, like:

• nvALT for Mac, which I previously used.
• Listary for iOS, which Amy and I use to share a few todo lists.

Things is still my main task manager. When talking with my coworkers, in the flow of typing within Simplenote, I sometimes slip the word “TODO” inline with the note, which I can quickly find later and import to Things with more context.

Pro tip: Date everything. You never know if you’ll need it later, and you can always cull or delete later.

Brett Kelly raves about Drafts for iOS (which I finally bought last month and still use), and it feels like Simplenote opens and works just as fast.

If you’re curious about “embedding” images and files, I’d suggest uploading them to your favorite file sharing or hosting service — like Cloudup! — and paste the link into your note.

Is your brain percolating? Do you have any other ideas to get the most out of Simplenote? I’d love to hear them. 🙂