The Digital Minimalist’s Complete Guide to Information Management in Apple Ecosystem

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Productivity Heaven

10 min readFeb 27, 2023

So I assume now we are clear with the problem of dealing with loads and loads of information. There is also an overview of my thoughts on the framework to approach this as well. Now let’s talk how that materialize in actual day-to-day life.

Let me recall those things I keep in mind when I operate with digital information:

I try to follow a single entry point principle for all the information I’m dealing with.
The Information should stay relevant, distilled and categorized. One of the options — according to its actionability (see PARA methodology)
The Information should stay accessible and easy to find at any given moment in time.

Why Apple?

There is a separate article on “Why Exactly Apple?” with my thoughts on why Apple products look pretty cool in our digital-information-management context, but key outtakes are these:

Ability to start right away. Everything is crystal clear and requires almost zero time spent learning.
The functionality is minimal, yet what they have available somehow magically covers all the essentials for managing your digital lifestyle and information.
“Seamless synergy” between products and tools often leads to the 1 + 1 = 3 formula.
The information is always at your fingertips and is accessible right away — Spotlight search enables this magic.
Great automation and customization capabilities with Shortcuts.

Choosing the Single Entry Point

From the ITIL’s best practices, I know it is best to streamline and operationalize your daily routines through a single point of entry. This will enable you to become almost automatic at certain activities and avoid spending hours for nothing.

But what can serve as this entry point? I use three of them in the Apple Ecosystem:

1 — Inbox in the Apple Mail application. It’s all clear here, you just cannot avoid having incoming mail on a daily basis, there will always be something from someone in your mailbox to process. The only way I ease my pain here is by creating smart folders for “Unread” messages and messages arrived “Today”.

2 — Inbox in the Apple Files application. This is just my replacement for well-known productivity citadels — Downloads folder and Desktop folder (that was a joke, obviously). I have renamed Downloads to Inbox and moved it to the iCloud Drive. I’ve also pointed all the applications that may potentially use regular Downloads folder to the new location (Safari, Slack, etc). This way I have unified file "inbox" across all my devices, that follows very similar processing principles.

3 — Daily Notes in Apple Notes application. This is the place for almost all the content that I generate throughout the day — notes, drafts, thoughts, meeting minutes, screenshots, summaries, handwritten notes, and so on.

Quick Note in the bottom right corner is a Productivity Heaven by Apple

I have extensively worked with dozens of applications you can ever come across within the AppStore. But I gotta admit that I kept returning to Apple Notes despite its comparatively limited functionality and simplicity.

I started to analyze. What is so special about Apple Notes? What is there that is absent in the other tools that keeps me turning to Apple’s default app? I came up with the whole list of something you might not find anywhere else (see my article about Apple Notes).

In short:

Content-agnostic. Apple Notes fits perfectly for collecting various types of information — text, docs, scans, handwritten content, sketches, images, links, and so on;
Deeply integrated into the OS across all kinds of Apple devices;
Has a Quick Note functionality, which is seriously useful everyday;
Easy to populate and accessible via very simple ways;
Simple and easy to learn and navigate.

Believe me, Apple Notes is actually really far from being just a simple text-based notes storage. It’s one of the best all-around and versatile choices you may find to build your information management system.

Now let me tell you how I operate with Apple Notes daily.

Collecting the Information in the Daily Quick Notes

My main intention is to spend the least amount of time possible deciding what to store and where. I can do this if I postpone decision-making to a later, more convenient time.

Consequently, I gotta have a very clear, effortless, and repeatable way to populate my tool of choice and store the content.

There are several ways to do this, and one of them is absolutely incorrect :)

Wrong way: create a folder structure and try to create notes right in the corresponding folders during the day. For example, you have one folder for travel stuff, one for interesting articles, and another for legal documents. During the day when you come across travel-related info you put it directly into the Travel folder, legal docs are going to the Legal folder directly, etc. This is wrong!
Possible way: create an Inbox folder in Apple Notes and put all the incoming information into it as separate notes during the day. Sort notes later into appropriate folders. Good, possible, but we can do better.
Best way: create a unique Daily Note every day (1 day = 1 note) and populate it with content using a Quick Note functionality. Sort it in the evening during the evening routine.

Take a look at my actual Quick Notes / Daily Notes setup in my Apple Notes after a couple of months:

A lot of my Daily Notes content is populated automatically via the Apple Shortcuts, which I’ll cover in a separate article. But for now, it should be enough to get the idea.

Why this approach works?

First and foremost it allows me to defer thinking, deciding, and sorting the information for later.
The routine of populating content is repeatable and unified across all of Apple devices. I have Quick Note functionality on iPhones, iPads, and Macs working in exactly the same way. So I spend no time learning how to operate your tools and do this almost automatically.
I have a new Daily Note every day, working as a canvas for all my thoughts and ideas throughout the day. It also protects my from cluttering, which would normally take place if I had one single place or note open for eternity (like the way #2 above suggests).
Newly created blank Daily Note is a great place to start the day — without leftovers from yesterday or other clutter. This can play well as a digital analogue of new page of a paper planner or notebook.

Distilling & Categorizing

Most people do not even categorize the information and leave the mess as is. Some people categorize the information based on its source, i.e. where this information came from.

But I assume, the correct way to categorize it is based on where you aim to apply or use this information. This latter part is inevitably related to your overall goals and activities. Personal goals are something that always has to be taken into account to effectively organize one’s 2nd World.

Take a look at the example.

John has sent me a contract via email. Based on the information management principles we discussed earlier, leaving the contract in the email app is probably a bad idea.

Why?

Email is very bad at searching for information, especially attachments
It is not intended to store the information at all.
It is just a communication method (quite old and outdated either, honestly).

But where should I store the damn contract?

So I already know that Apple Notes might be a good fit here. The first intention might be to create a folder “Email Documents” and put the file under it. Or “Source: Email”. Or, if John happens to be sending me documents quite often, I might think of “Sent By John”. Or, maybe in the best case, “Contracts”.

Wrong. None of those categories bring any value to me.

As I mentioned in the previous article, we gotta grow some habits and start giving yourself a couple of minutes to think, instead of compulsively and blindly manipulating things.

I’d go deeper.

What this contract is referring to?
Is there any project associated with it?
When and where do I think I may need this contract next time?
Is it for the upcoming clients or shareholders meeting?
What is my goal when I intend to save this document at all?

If it is just to have some logical structure for the sake of structure — this is misleading and will bring you to an uncontrollable trashcan of barely usable information.

Do you think you will unlikely use it anywhere other than for some historical references in the future? Well, this goes to the archive at best.

The whole purpose of this story is to spend less time searching for information, be super effective in manipulating the information, and ease the storage burden off your brain while getting your life goals accomplished.

Goals

The part in bold is important.

What are the goals you are pursuing? I believe you gotta have some. Because goals have a magical ability to structure things on their own. Without the goal set any movement will be in the wrong direction. On the contrary, if you have one, it will very well filter out everything irrelevant and distill only the content that matters.

Goals have a magical ability to structure things

So, getting back to the example above, options for this particular Contract location may vary anywhere among these options:

“Meeting with Shareholders”
“Documents for New Company”
“Monthly Legal Review”

And only if I cannot foresee any meaningful appliance for the doc, I put it somewhere in the archive-like folder:

“Partners Contracts Archive”
“Legal Documents Archive”

…but surely not the “Email Documents” folder :)

Context is everything

“Why Notes but not Files?” — you may ask. That’s a very relevant question, that well-deserves a separate conversation. But in short, the context is often the key differentiator.

In my particular case, an isolated file that is left somewhere in the file system, is often of a less value when it is out of context. Notes, or anything more sophisticated than just a file manager, do exactly this — they help you wrap particular file with some context around, give it more meaning and value. The longer you work with Digital Information, the more evident it is — a single file stored somewhere inside your file system is rarely a self-sufficient creature.

So,

Files are good as an Inbox for Downloads or any other isolated files that do not require a context. Files are also good for any Work-in-Progress documents or projects, that are still being baked and / or require collaboration with other people.

while

Notes are good for static files that require some context around it, and will not require any further modification (outcomes of your work, projects, reference documents, resources for your projects, etc)

Evening Routine

If we get back to the example above, as you can see, the decision-making process takes quite some time. And that is why the most effective way to go would be to defer it to a more convenient time. The time when you have enough resources to make quality decisions and reflect on the day.

To me more often it happens to be the evening. This is when I am less likely to be distracted and I don’t have anything urgent to deal with.

So, I worked all day with my Daily Note. As we have agreed, I haven’t spent too much time filtering the content out or thinking about where to put the information. So, most probably, by the end of the day my Daily Note has tons of very different content stored — from simple ideas, sketches, and call notes to files and useful links to articles or videos to watch.

I suggest an evening routine that actually makes the whole system work. Before I go to sleep, I am taking a look at my Daily Note and analyze its entries answering these questions:

Do I need this particular information at all? If I’m 100% sure I don’t, I delete it.
Is this information actionable? If yes, this goes to my ToDo app (Apple Reminders in my case)
If it is not actionable (i.e. reference information), where will I need this information in the future? Which goal will it help me to achieve if I store it? Decide where exactly you will store this content for further references so that the easiness of navigation and “searchability” of this content is at its maximum.

Ideally, at the very end of the day, the Daily Note will be blank.

Of course, if you do not use it for journalling, diary, or mood tracking — which is something it actually may serve very well! In this case, all your daily thoughts will belong to a specific date, while all the other content will be sorted out as effectively as possible.

There is a whole separate topic on routines, which I want to cover separately, so for now let me take a break (and finish my evening routine 😉) to get back in the next one.

P.S. If you are using Craft — check out my other article about organizing yourself in Craft