Task Workflow in Bear Notes
During another iteration of getting creative in my attempts to stretch applications beyond their limits (and the designed use cases), I came up with quite an interesting workflow for Bear Notes, which [at least for one week] served as a good one-stop-shop both for non-actionable and actionable types of notes.
Let’s see if that’s something you may find interesting. But to me it looks like something that may work out quite well, if you don’t rely on notifications or reminders (which Bear, obviously, does not support).
The setup
1. Daily Notes
First of all, I use daily notes with a configured date picker to navigate between them. This date picker resides in my menu bar on Mac and is added to the Home Screen on my iPhone.
As you can see, once I invoke this shortcut, it shows me a calendar, where I choose a desired date. If there is an existing daily note in Bear for this date, it brings me right into it. If not — it creates the new one. I skip the “create new daily note” part, as this is highly personal for each of us. Just add whatever works for you better — with or without the Calendar events, special sections, weather forecasts, or whatnot.
2. ISO 8601
Second thing — all the dates I ever mention across my notes are in ISO8601 format with no exception. “2024–04–20” and nothing else. This is important due to multiple reasons.
3. Sort by Title
One of them — I sort my notes by title. This allows me to have a timeline-like view for any notes that have dates in their title. Daily notes or meetings or whatnot — I can always see a time-based progression. I don’t use sorting by edit or creation date, as the Today view is enough for my case. And ISO8601 allows a meaningful sorting — first by year, then by month, and then by day.
4. Today-related
Another reason — I use a quick shortcut to look for today date immediately in Bear Search. This way I see all the notes that mention “today” anywhere in their text, not to miss anything. This shortcut resides right in the daily note as well as my home screen, so it’s always 1 click away:
bear://x-callback-url/search?term=2024–04–20
As you understand, this allows me to simply mention certain date anywhere in the note body, and I won’t miss it when specific day comes. Btw I went as far as assigning this shortcut to the Action Button of my iPhone 15 Pro. Just one click and you see all the notes that are relevant for today. Try yourself. [Eagerly waiting for a designated camera button in 16 pro…]
5. Add task to Today Note
I also use a shortcut to add any selected text as a task to Today daily note, with the link to the source note.
This “creativity” is actually a cool thing to quickly add a todo to your list of items for today. I have it assigned to CMD + SHIFT + T — when I hit it on the selected text, it gets the text, finds the note you’re invoking it from, and appends it to your daily note with the link to the source note. Quite cool. Since my daily notes is something I will anyway review in the evening — all of the incomplete items will 100% be moved either to the next day, or to the backlog (see below)
6. Backlog
I have a Backlog note with the tasks I have not yet decided when to work on. Similar to Anytime in Things. Just random stuff split by sections. Good thing is that I can always find a source of this item, using the built in linking mechanism in Bear Note. It may probably make sense to create a shortcut to add directly to Backlog in addition to the Daily Note, but let’s see…
7. Keep Todo Tidy
Finally, I try to be very careful with what I have in the Todo view (@Todo). I keep an eye on it, to make sure only really actionable information is there. E.g. Daily notes with planned tasks, backlog note pinned to top, some select project notes I’d like to be visibile. Nothing else. Outdated projects or those on hold → to Archive. Importantly, I make sure there are no days with incomplete tasks in past. And this, surprisingly, works.
That’s mainly it. 7 steps with some automations involved, but, unexpectedly, it works quite well for now.
Drawbacks
Obviously, since Bear does not have any sort of reminders to show an alert when some action is due, those kind of tasks are hard to cover appropriately. But hey, if you need a reminder to pay rent or taxes, just use Apple Reminders or Things, whatever works for you better. For anything else — Bear can handle.
Also, recurring tasks are obviously missed out, or require extra manual effort to get added to particular daily note. The similar story is happening with NotePlan, for example, but nobody complains… maybe you will find it as something doable. But it is definitely not something I consider convenient.
Routine
The routine part is minimal. Just take care of your daily notes, review them in the evening, and make sure Todo view does not get overloaded, and contains only the notes you are actually working on. When I hit hard on stuff I used to treat as “actionable” I was surprised how many of those are “on hold” or “inactive for 6 months already” or whatnot. And honestly I felt no regret moving them to Archive. When the next time I see them coming back — I’ll just resurrect them from the Archive. Until then — liberation.
Also, while we’re on the Routines topic, I must say that every Sunday it is a no effort to review my daily notes for past 7 days to get the picture of my week. That’s how I build my weekly report with achievements and challenges — something I would recommend to anyone to keep track of how close you’re getting to your goals.
Summary
I think this workflow is something close to a physical planner, but with obvious digital benefits. Thanks to the support for Apple Shortcuts, Bear is absolutely fine with Daily Notes. And if you want to go nuts, you can even create yourself a Date Picker to navigate to any day immediately. What’s cool is that no matter how much efforts you put into this, it will anyway be less than figuring out Obsidian’s Dataview selects 😆
Aside from the drawbacks outlined above, I am yet to see concerns to this approach. Let’s see how it goes, but for now I can say I was honestly surprised by the capabilities of Bear Notes, if you put some extra thoughts, and go heavy on Shortcuts…
Anyways, hope this will inspire you guys for your explorations — and please make sure the share them with me! I am eager to bounce our ideas off each other — maybe together we can create a monster workflow nobody would ever think would be possible! 😃
