Organizing Your Notes

After seeing a post within the David Allen Getting Things Done forum questioning how one can organize Notes on a Pocket PC, I thought it might be good to revisit this subject. (I first touched on it in a September 2006 blog herein.)

In the previous blog article, I talked about the built-in Pocket PC Notes application and also about PhatNotes. I'll do the same here, although with a few additional points.

One of the things I most like about PhatNotes is that it lets me organize my Pocket PC Notes by Category, as indicated below:

A view of one of the Notes is shown below:

With PhatNotes, I can also link one Note to another (or others) and to other types of documents, such as Excel spreadsheets. It also allows you to set an alarm for a Note, so that it will popup at a specific time. You can also assign different colors to different types of Notes. And, within each Note, you can use formatting, such as text bolding, bullets, underlining, and so on. PhatNotes also comes with a free spell-checking utility, which can be really handy. And, for those who already have a lot of Notes in Outlook (such as me), you will like the fact that PhatNotes lets you import those Notes. Finally, it should be noted that PhatNotes supports the Vista operating system.

Regarding the built-in Notes app, I must say it was one of the few things that disappointed me when I transitioned from a Palm to a Pocket PC (some years ago): Notes that I had categorized on the Palm would not carry the category information over to the Pocket PC. The Pocket PC Notes app just lists Notes by subject (or date, size, or type) but not by Category: ActiveSync and the Pocket Outlook Object Model do not support syncing category information for Notes.

Although I use PhatNotes more often than the Notes app, I have found that there are a couple of ways around the "category problem" with the Notes app. One is to rename all the Notes, putting a Category abbreviation as the first part of the Name, followed by an underscore and then the Name. For example, a Note named Roles could be renamed to List_Roles. Then all "List Category" Notes would appear together when sorted by Name.

Another way to do it is to move the Notes to Folders under the Pocket PC My Documents folder. The My Documents folder comes standard with two subfolders already there for such use: Personal and Business. It's easy enough to add more folders, such as Lists, Reference, Research, etc. The downside to this is that the Notes app does not show Notes sorted by folders. If you want to view Notes by folder, you either have to use the Pocket PC File Manager (or a replacement, such as TotalCommander or Resco File Explorer), or the PIM Pocket Informant, which lets you view Notes by folder (Pocket Informant also lets you PhatNotes notes from within Pocket Informant).

Note that Outlook supports organizing notes by folder in that it shows the folder name as part of the Note name within the Notes view of Outlook. (At least this is true of Outlook 2003; I am not sure about Outlook 2007.) So, the view within Outlook would look something like the following:

Lists\NoteName1
Lists\NoteName2
...
Ref\NoteName1
Ref\NoteName2

One advantage to using the built-in Notes app is that Missing Sync gives you the ability to sync the Notes with a Mac. And, if you use Yojimbo on your Mac, the Folders within it sync with the folders under the My Documents folder of your Pocket PC. Hence, it maintains a form of "category support" this way. Although I still primarily sync with my Windows XP Pro laptop, it is good to be able to sync Notes info (and Calendar and Tasks and files) to my Mac.