How using only Apple Notes dramatically improved my life – The PALA System6 min read

I couldn’t do it anymore. Notion, Obsidian, PDF, Google Drive, Readwise, Feedly, it was all too much. I was losing information constantly, not knowing where to put my notes, quotes, and underlines, and spending 80% of the time organizing the information as opposed to actually learning from it.

I was overwhelmed, distracted, and constantly searching for the ‘perfect’ note tool.

I made one simple change that transformed everything: I switched to just Apple Notes.

In this post, I will show you how Apple Notes helped me simplify my workflow, get more done, and dramatically improve my life:

• PALA Folder System
• MECE organization
• Personalization and Longevity

1. My difficulty with PARA

I categorize my entire life into 4 categories using a modified PARA system.

Many people use the PARA system:

1. Projects (current important projects)
2. Areas (I honestly have no clue, supposedly areas of your life that are important)
3. Resources (Notes of everything you learn)
4. Archive (old stuff of above three)

My problem was I struggled to differentiate between the first three, so, I essentially redesigned it to fit my needs. I realized I wanted to accomplish three things:

• Quickly access what is important to me
• Keep track of future actions I want to do
• Keep track of every single thing I read, listened to, or watched

So, I invented the PALA system, which is the same thing but with a few modifications.

2. PALA system

1. Projects – A maximum of 3 current priorities, if can be only 1, even better. I am currently at two priorities, coding and my YouTube/internet thing.
2. Actions – things I want to do but aren’t a priority right now. As you can see there are things like Hiking, Lucid Dreaming, Business, Travel, TV to watch, etc. The important thing here is everything in this category is a collection of ideas of actions to take.
3. Learning – my largest repository of everything I learn, including book notes, podcast notes, clothes notes, recipes, and languages I am learning. The media folder, for example, currently has notes on 50 books I read. I plan to convert these to my website soon.
4. Archives – all notes I don’t anticipate using soon (in <1 year).

They all have “0” items in them. That is on purpose because each of these things will have a bunch of sub-folders where the items will be. If I put an item or a new note there, it’s because it’s not sorted yet. I’ll sort it into its individual sub-folder at a certain time.

We want to make a system that is easy and can last forever.

3. SubFolders & MECE

I try to make subfolders that include everything and are MECE. What does MECE mean? Mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive. It means that we have a place for everything we might possibly want and no overlap between folders.

This is important for finding things and staying organized! Everyone is very complicated. So, how are we going to stay organized? For example, in my relationships Folder, it goes into:

• Relationships
  • Family
    • Immediate
    • Extended
  • Friends
    • Close
    • Far
  • Romantic
  • Business
    • YouTube
    • Consulting
    • Medicine
    • Startups

This relationships category will cover every relationship I could possibly have.

Try to make subfolders rather than include everything and be MECE. What does MECE mean? Mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive.

Now, you can get too ridiculous here, for example. In my Learning section, I began to have everything broken down by category. Still, I never could be bothered to go into each individual sub-folder, so I just have the folders at the top that I actually use.

I didn’t use the below system at all.

That’s where you come in. The note system should make sense to you and be quick and easy to use.

That was the whole reason I switched to Apple Notes in the first place. So now my learning section looks like this, with nearly everything in media.

3. Accessories

Ok, so that’s pretty much it, some final tips:

• Make it YOUR OWN. Who cares how fancy it looks if you never use it? So, I would focus the most on what actually matters to you! For example, if I were an Art Historian working on a new exhibit or something, I would put exhibits at the top, maybe a subfolder of Ancient Greece, and so on.
• Use Things or a to-do app to jot down ideas or tasks at the moment, then add them to your notes later.
• I think my Actions Subfolders are actually pretty good. I have Relationships broken out of those folders because I want to be able to reference them quickly, but if I was truly MECE, it would be under Personal Life or Business
• You can store pretty much anything in notes, PDFs, photos, videos, audio recordings, whatever you want. I have a PDF-only note that contains all my journal entries.
• I nearly always have all the folders expanded out because I don’t have that many so I can quickly find the ones I need by scrolling for two seconds.

Ok I hope that helps, best of luck on regaining your sanity! This helped me.

I know I would care, so here are all my folders listed out!