This is one of the best ways that I've seen Apple Notes used ever. Forever Notes is a brand new framework and system that you can use with your Apple Notes to set things up for the future. While it takes limited time to set up, many people are moving to this system because what it does is

help you to create a framework around your most basic application, turning it into more of a PKM Journal research type application which is going to help you to structure your notes into a better way and create some sort of system around how you take notes on Apple Notes. We're going to show you

everything in this video, including how to set it up and all of the insights into getting started. While it won't show you every little detail, it'll show you the basics of what you need to know about Forever Notes and there's much more resources that will dig deeper. My name is Francesco Delisio

and welcome to the Tool Finder YouTube channel. So before we begin, a very simple overview of this concept because it's important to understand what it can do for you and how it works. This concept is called the Forever Notes concept and it's a layer over your Apple Notes to better help you to

organize and structure your account. The idea was developed with an inspiration around the Second Brain and Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal concept, and Matus wanted to create a concept that allows you to stick with your Apple Notes for longer and also create a system that you can stick with with

Apple Notes that is typical inside of other apps like Obsidian, Rome, and Evernote, and many more. So what are the benefits of using this concept? Well, it gives you a homepage to your Apple Notes, which allows you then to go into every single day and find relevant things. It also gives you

the ability to plan projects to manage a journal
and also to go deeper with some of your goals and
targets all through your Apple Notes as well as
Target milestones and tasks as well all nested in
the same place the benefit as well is that this
is going to be free and if you're on iOS and Mac

it's going to be synchronized across devices and
be a much more structured framework for you
so we're going to do a full guide on how to use
this in this video to help you fully understand
it before we begin please do make sure you
hit subscribe and also check out our buyers

guide to note-taking apps if you want to expand
Beyond Apple Notes or you're interested in better
managing how you use it let's get started so
let's get started with creating your Forever Notes
experience in Apple Notes and I'm going to be
doing this giving you guides throughout this so I

recommend getting a cup of tea and getting started
with this now if you're a McLaren fan there will
be a Ferrari in the background so I do apologize
but this is a good view for setting up your Apple
Notes so let's get stuck in now you probably
notice I'm not actually on the Apple Notes app

and that's because with this system you have to
start inside of going to settings go to General
go to keyboard then go to text replacement now the
reason you do this is cuz you want to change that
double asterisk into to a really big asterisk and
the importance behind that is you want this to be

much easier to search so inside of your account
it turns anything that's created into that now
to skip a little bit of Step the best thing to do
is to create a folder called Forever Notes and the
idea behind this is so that everything is stored
in here it's a little bit more organized you will

be able to create more folders don't worry
we'll get to that and this will save a bunch of time now if you go and press a new note
then then we're going to go ahead and create the homepage now the homepage is really simple
we're going to do that double asterisk and we're

going to call it home everything's built around
this asterisk concept it's a little bit like bullet journaling because obviously that asterisk will
help you find things but it also follows some of the ideologies around that so what do you add to
your homepage it's a little bit different because

what we're able to add is a calendar things
called hubs and things called resources but your
homepage can be built up of anything that's easily
accessible to you so you can if you want cheat and
build a homepage from scratch or you can cheat by
creating a homepage using one of their commands so

there's actually a shortcut which you can actually
find as part of the link in description that if
you press the homepage shortcut it's going to go
ahead and create one of these homepages for you
now obviously it's not going to be in this folder
so let's go and find it it's up up here and as you

can see it's pretty much a worked homepage for you
now you can start to see some of the details like
they've added a lovely header image projects hubs
and also people and resources which will come to
so this might be a good starting point for you
to get the basics in but it won't obviously be

your final product because you're going to refine
this and make this better so the next thing that
they recommend doing as part of this system is
to create what's called Tags now obviously tags
are well known in productivity for helping you to
organize where things go so let's go ahead and

create a few tags to get you started so I think
one of the best things to do is start listing your tags at the bottom of the homepage now the
idea behind this is to start populating the tags for example you can add anything that's correlated
to things that you're going to add to your system

so in this case it could be recipes reference
projects Etc but it's an idea around setting up these that will help you to organize the structure
of your account so when we get these started and in you'll start to see that you can use the smart
folders to help organize these in a better fashion

so those are some of the basics that I want to go
ahead and create so as you can see at the bottom here I've got a few of the tags and tags only
exist if you keep them as part of your or one

page at least so they won't detect any tags if
you don't have it in your account so the best thing to do is to start making some smart folder
collections based on these so for example in my case I wanted an upcoming trips folder so in this
case I'm going to go ahead and press this folder

icon and I'm going to call it trips so if I press
make it a smart folder what I'm going to choose here is a tag and I'm going to choose a selected
tag and I'm going to press trip and once I press

done as long as a criteria I'm happy with for
example you can add 2024 trips or those sort of things and add more filters to help you narrow down
but I'm going to go ahead and press done so there

we go there's my first ever collection and you can
do this with whatever you want I'm actually going to
do a run through of how I would set this up nearer
the end but you can also sort it by for example trips
that are coming up etc obviously you can see my home
note is showing now but obviously

when I add and begin to add more trips it'll start
to populate and I can remove that tag from the
homepage for later one other way you could do
it is call a page tags and add all of the tags
you've created inside of here as not to keep it
on the homepage and almost have a directory like

experience inside of your account so you can do
this for whatever you want the collections can be
used for books ideas thoughts even projects that
you're working on and people that you interact
with quite often but tags are going to help you to
structure your account later on so the next thing

to do is something called hubs and hubs are a bit
more of a grounded experience in your account they
indicate that they're more of a resource so for
example I'm going to create a hub called fitness
goals so I'm going to give it a hash hub and now
when I come to my fitness goals I can set this up

a little bit later to break it down in more detail
so you can have as many hubs as you want and once
I am going to add my hyrox training finance
and other goals as part of my work work but
you can also add projects as well I will be adding
house repairs and scrum planning something we're

launching soon and you can also have a journal too
so now we've created a home area and a tags area
collections you can also create as well through
those smart folders you've also got hubs there's
also the journal area now to be honest the journal
area is a little bit more complicated for example

I think the best place to start is by creating Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4, and also the 12 months of the year. Now this can be created from the home area and added at a later date if you find it more suitable.

I actually used one of their iOS shortcuts they created to set this up, but it actually went and created 365 dates in the calendar for every single day, which I found really, really stressful. I don't know about you, but you could do that concept or you just could create them at the same time or

link them as you go. So maybe it's best if you run this, it does take a few minutes to get through, and in the background start using all of these to link to them. And I'll show you how that's done. The

journal part, in my opinion, is probably the most exciting element of it because you can create it how you like. So let's go to the homepage that I created earlier, and one of the things I can do straight away is remove some of these elements at the bottom. Now that we have a tags area, we don't

need those tags at the bottom, and you can start to see this hubs area is becoming more useful now because I created the health area. What I can do is actually go over to add link. So I actually called it fitness goals, but you can start to see if I do the use the double asterisks and find it here, I

can change it to that title and press done. So now I've got an entry, my first ever Hub, all connected up to my homepage, so it's a good starting point if I'm building out my Hubs area now. If I go down and

I make some space I can also create the calendar area which will become my journal in a moment so in this case I need to connect up the Q1 which is the start of the year and it's something that I imported through that I shortcuts which I'll include in a link in the description now you can

press two right arrows and find stuff much faster and then that means that I can go over add those two asterisks and type in Q1 and there we go I've got a link note automatically now what they do in their start of their account is they add in items like this now if you do want you don't have to

have that link look here you can actually have it as more of a raw link if you want and what I can do here is link to Jan so in this case I can link here to January which was created in February because that's part of Q1 and March because that's part of Q1 too all I can do is go to add link and type in

January and in this case I'm not going to set that as the note title's name and press done so as you can see it links a little bit more efficiently than they do on their website this setting to look a little bit neater and you can populate this down here with Q2 and the 3 months as part of it

and as you can imagine it takes a little bit of time to load now say I was in January now this is what the January looks like and because I imported this it does look slightly weird and as you can see it hasn't really populated it properly now this was much more complicated to do and I'd recommend

taking a look at the website because this takes a little bit of time and I don't think the import fully mastered this what I recommend doing is starting to use this area for things like your goals so inside of your account as you're using this journal there are a few different things

there's signifiers and the signifiers can be a
great way to modify your details as well in the
account so there are a few different signifiers
if you were to add a checklist item that would
indicate that you are using a milestone if you if
you were to add a dash that would be the in the

form of a note if you add a dash with some of the
highlighting elements that would in be important
and one 2 3 4 are all priority items that's how
they recommend the structure to be in your account
if you've got an event they recommend adding just
one asterisk to indicate that the asterisk comes

up so in this case even though it's not an event I
could put UFC event and that would be deemed as an
event it's more of a visual way to help define the
details so if I go back to the homepage now I can

start modifying some of the details in here for
example if I did have a kitchen renovation what
I can do is actually link it to that relevant
note and as you can see that started to link
to that kitchen renovation details here so here's
another one if I wanted to add a bunch of people

for example persons mentioned I could use the
smart filter to bring that tag along but if
I had more people that at mentioned this part of
my iMessage I can bring those in too in this case
let's go ahead and create an area called people
now in order to create a person then what I'm

going to have to do is press the plus button and
say I wanted to add my wife then I would have to
add person below her and then start adding details
about it for example I can add in here things that
I need to do goals and other elements like that
and as that's now a person in my account I could

even add an icon and make things look a little bit
different now inside of my homepage. I could then go to
this first part and type in Becca and add the link so
that I'm able to see and add a bit of detail to it now.
I guess if I wanted to as well, I could add a little
bit of emoji to this as

well, for example a heart, and I could add done at
the top and go back, and in my homepage it should
come up with a little bit of emoji as well to add
a little bit of spice to the page. So this is the

very basics of getting started with this. There's
actually a lot more that you need to comprehend
and understand, and setting this up might take a
little bit of time. It's actually taken 15 minutes
to get to even this point, so I would probably
recommend setting in 1 hour to fully get in

the homepage, the tags, the collections, the hubs,
the journals, the signifies, and get started with
the backlinks. My recommendation is obviously
1 hour. Once you set this up, you'll go from here
here, and you can probably add stuff as you go.
Adding things like tags at a later date is a

lot easier. For example, if you start reading books
using hashtags, then creating a smart folder for
books is probably a lot easier. And then things
like adding hubs, the calendar is probably the
most difficult place. For example, in this Q1 area,
I would have to indicate that this is Q1 of 2024

but I could scratch this if I did want to. And some
of these elements here, you might have to build out
from using the guide that they've provided
online. It's a little bit choppy, but at the
same time, you could start using it now. Onto that
journal element that I was talking about as well.

say it was January 1st and I did want to write
a journal entry because I imported that earlier from for example the iOS shortcuts thing I could
then do this search for the 1st of January and if I'm able to scroll and find it then I can click
into it and I could start writing my journal for

that day ahead for example I could say walked with
Becca and I could start writing details about this so what's helpful as well is I'm naturally able
to see all of the different relationships between these notes as well so that's how I recommend
about going to use the journal function it might

be a little bit more difficult longer term because
you might have to recreate these each year and run the script each year but all that you would have
to do is add the actual date behind it and you can see January J 2024 comes in then you press done
and you can have it linked obviously directly to

the January uh folder so all I'd have to do is add
2024 here so there's a lot of things that you can do in terms of customizations with the journal and
this is really just a starting point to give you a

structure but hopefully that's giving you an idea
of the account if you want to see my full Apple notes forever notes you can find find it linked
below if you're interested how far I got up to and a few screenshots that might you might find
important but this system is quite helpful the

final thing that you might be asking yourself is
how do I get some of these images I'll also link them below as the Creator is naturally brought
some stuff in so that you can save time adding these items in so that's forever notes and it's
an interesting structure to your Apple notes this

Homepage connects calendars, projects, hubs, and people using Bank links and to better organize how you structure them. So, thank you very much and I hope this helped you set up your Forever Notes. [Music] [Music]

Forever Notes: Ultimate Beginner's Guide

Forever Notes: Ultimate Beginner's Guide