My Bear Workflow. Leveraging Apple Shortcuts

Updated: 18th of July 2023 - fixed links, new daily note shortcut

So now, as we are clear on what this Bear beast is, let me tell you a bit more about my Bear Workflow. But before we move on, I highly recommend checking the previous article out, as there you might find some important aspects of working with Bear Notes, features overview, and the difference between tags and linked notes.

Morning: Daily Notes

I have to say I continue to follow my Daily Notes practice. Can’t find anything that could effectively replace it. I tried sticking to a single “Today” note, but honestly, it does not work very well for me.

And after managing Daily Notes in Apple Notes, Daily Notes in Bear shine with completely new colours. You’ll see why in a minute.

First of all, as usual, every morning I create a daily note using the preconfigured shortcut:

This thing scans all the events in my calendar for today, grabs a weather forecast, and creates a daily note with today’s date in the Title. In one click. Can’t ask for more.

The One and Only Daily Note Shortcut You Will Need

Daytime: working with Notes and Links.

Now, when I open it, I have all my events in front of me, plus the designated space for tasks & notes.

Check out those quick navigation links :P

The great thing about links in Bear is that I can highlight Any Thing (task, event, person, whatever), press CMD+D, and immediately create a note devoted solely to this Thing.

Due to the fact I can quickly create links to respective notes, I don’t have to throw all kinds of stuff and types of content into one single messy line within a Daily Note. I can quickly navigate back and forth between the insides of those items in my Daily Note just by clicking on the respective link to other notes.

As a result, the Daily Note looks much cleaner during the day and is much easier to navigate.

And obviously, throughout the day my Daily Note is always open in a separate narrow window.

Daytime: Working with Events. Fancy Meeting Notes Automation

For my work meetings, I have created a special automation that would create a feature-rich event note directly in Bear in one click. Don’t need to explain how easy is that to note down meeting minutes if you have some project discussions planned for the day.

Just try this shortcut — it should work both in the old and new versions of Bear:

EventNoteShortcut

Here is what it will do:

1. It will take the event title you share through the share sheet, or enter manually
2. It will try to find this event via its title among today’s events first
3. If it is not able to find it today, it will expand the search to a broader timeframe
4. Then it’ll take the event’s title, names of the attendees, and event notes and store them as a predefined pre-formatted text
5. Final step: it will create a new Bear Event Note with the text compiled

As a result, I have all the people reflected with links to their respective notes, the date of the event leading to a corresponding Daily Note, and also all the content of the event is propagated into the note’s body. Quite neat if you happen to have tons of those calls daily.

And obviously the event that sits on my Daily Note calendar list is titled the same, I just press CMD+D and get into the newly created Event Note right from the Daily Note.

End of the Week.

At the end of the week, I create a Weekly Report with links to 7 Daily Notes of the past week. I review each one of them for the achievements and challenges (see here why it is important) and also start planing for the next week from there.

Planning.

For the planning phase, there are multiple options. I can create a separate note, something like Weekly Plan Apr 10 — Apr 16. But I can also just start the new Weekly Report for the new week (just like the one above) and reflect my plans out there directly.

Then, at the end of the next week, I can simply compare my plan against the real accomplishments and challenges.

Summary. What do I miss after so much time with Apple Notes?

Well, I probably had a couple of thoughts about Quick Notes and their integration into the system, which provided ability to dump content quickly… But that’s now partially replaced by the super functional daily note in Bear, that now just sits on top of other windows (on Mac) in the right section of the screen.

Second thing is the Spotlight search. Obviously it is was designed to reveal 100% of its potential only with the Apple Products. So while Bear does support Spotlight integration to a certain extent, especially on mobile OSs, I’d say nothing can beat Apple Notes on Mac from the discoverability perspective. So my workflow had to adjust to that as well.

Overall after switching to Bear I can say that the amount of content I started to generate has increased drastically. I feel there is a “click” that Bear somehow magically keeps at your fingertips — it’s all about how easy is that to offload what’s in your head, and then connect it to your other thoughts and resources. You don’t spend much time thinking “How”, instead you have all the time in the world to think “What” and “Why”.

And this is important.