Notes vs Reminders Which should you use?

0:00 It's time we finally answer the age old question. Should you use notes? Or should you use reminders? Stick around and we'll find out. I'm Dylan Stewart, the MacWhisperer, and in today's video I'm going to take two of my favorite programs, notes and reminders, and compare them to each other in five separate categories to help you figure out when to use one versus the other. But don't slip out the back door before hearing my MacWhisperer power tip, because this tip is going to make it so much easier regardless of which application you're using. So let's hop on in and get started.

0:45 I have five separate categories to compare these two powerful applications. And in each category, either app can win up to five Steve jobs. The more Steve's we get, the better that application does in that particular category. And our first category, is ease of use. When it comes to simplicity and ease of use, it's really difficult to knock notes. Notes is just such a simple application that most people have used it at least once or twice without any sort of instructions or help. You come directly into a note, you click the little new note button in the bottom right hand corner, and you type up or dictate whatever you want. It's as simple as this. I'm thinking about doing a new YouTube video

1:31 comparing notes and reminders and giving all the pluses and minuses to each of them in five different categories. And all of a sudden, I've got a note and I'm ready to go. Notes is just perfect for when you need to take an idea or a thought or a list and just Drop it on a page so that you don't forget it and you can come back to it later. It's such a simple application that it's hard to really find any negatives around its ease of use. So I'm going to give it five Steves right off the bat. But when we come over to reminders, it's It's not quite the same situation. Most users don't even know about reminders and have barely ever used it. Maybe once in a while they decline a phone call and accidentally click the remind me button, or occasionally they ask Siri to remind them something,

2:16 and they don't really know where it goes to. Reminders is a bit of a complicated program out of the box. Before setting it up, When you come in, it's a little bit overwhelming. What are all these lists? What's all this information? Where am I supposed to put it? Sure, I can easily click the new reminder in the bottom left hand corner, but there's just not that much I can put into it without exploring it a little bit further. I can give it an easy title, such as, New YouTube Video. And I can come into the notes section , and I can add a little bit of details. This is a video comparing notes to reminders. But then what do I do? Do I set a reminder? Do I ask it to remind me at a location or on a date or a time? What priority do I give it?

3:01 It's just a much more complicated application. So I'm going to be generous. And give it two Steves. This is mostly because once you learn how to use it and some of the best tools for creating reminders, it can be really easy, but out of the box, it's a little bit overly complicated. So, Notes wins out on category number one. Category number two is Level of Detail. Meaning, how complex or complicated can you make the information you're putting into both of these programs? let's start off with Notes. Sure, you can make Notes simple. But you can also make it really complicated, adding photos and formatting and all sorts of information. Notes is great with really complex concepts and gives you a huge amount of flexibility,

3:48 formatting, and details. You can come in and easily give something a checklist down in the bottom or give it a numbered list without having to think too hard about it. You can easily add a photo by clicking right here. You can mark it up with your finger with the markup toolbar here. It's got such great capability and it's so flexible being able to do something as complicated as a recipe or as simple as a dinner party with links to other notes. It's got a huge amount of flexibility. You can even use it for things like credit cards where you can easily lock the note so that other people can't spy on your card numbers or get information that you don't want them to have. It's so powerful that when it comes to the level of detail that you can include in a note,

4:34 It wins out again, it's going to get five Steves. But let's not count Reminders out of this category yet. Even though Reminders has a relatively simple interface, and a single Reminder can't really hold that many details. Yeah, you can put a picture in there, but they don't look great. And you can add some titles and some notes and some basic information. You can be reminded of a certain day or time. but it's still pretty basic. But when you come into an actual list, It's amazingly complex, giving you the ability to create tasks and subtasks, giving you the ability to assign specific tasks to specific people, and the ability to create a column like Kanban board that allows

5:19 you to separate different categories and easily move things from one category to the other. So even though one single reminder doesn't have a lot of detail, when you put them into a list like this, you can do almost anything and accomplish all sorts of projects with links that connect you to particular websites or emails or other information pretty easily. So I'm going to give reminders four Steve's. Notes wins out because it's just so simple to format it. Once again, Notes wins this category. Let's move on to category number three. Category number three is searching. How easily can you search for this information? We'll start off with the current heavyweight notes.

6:04 Coming into notes, there's a search bar at the top and it's super easy to search for almost anything you're looking for. Just putting in my wife's name immediately gives me great results, including top hits of recent notes that we've worked on together. Anywhere that her name shows up, it pops right into this note, making it easy for me to find any the exact note that I'm looking for. Maybe it's something a little more complicated, like a specific ingredient inside of one recipe. And just by starting to write the word guacamole, I immediately find Not only my guacamole recipe, but other recipes like this pork chorizo that also has guacamole. When it comes to searching, Notes is the king. You can find anything you're looking for easily

6:50 and simply with just a couple of quick letters. It's going to be hard to beat that. Five Steves! But before we count reminders out, let's check out how searching is inside of it. We'll come up right up to the top here and I'll start with the same search doing a search for my wife. Now already I'm a little overwhelmed. It shows all the completed reminders in addition to all the uncompleted ones. So I'm going to have to hit the hide button in the upper right corner here to get rid of those. And it's bringing up a hodgepodge of Julie information without it being things that are recent or things that are really relevant to what I'm looking for. And if I come in for something a little more complicated. It still doesn't help. There's so many things that show up for reminders with this particular search that I'm just

7:35 never going to find what I'm looking for. I'm going to give it one Steve. Can I give it less than one Steve? I'm giving it a half of a Steve. Just because I still like it, but it's searching capabilities are just lousy. Category number four is filing and sorting. Let's take a look at notes and see how it does. Notes has this amazing ability to create folders and subfolders. And it's necessary because I have so many notes, you've got to be able to put them away somewhere. Searching just isn't good enough. I need to put them into folders. So I have. I've created very specific folders allowing me to come in and see specific topics within folders and subfolders.

8:21 Easy enough. Now, my downside on this is, it's a little hard to figure out which folder something's in when you're looking for it, unless you search for it. And even though you can have folders and subfolders, which makes things really helpful, because in any one category, I generally have, More categories inside of that. It's also a lot of work. And because it just doesn't happen on its own, in the notes folder that stores all of the notes that I haven't had a chance to sort yet, there's always a couple of hundred notes waiting for me to put them away. It just requires a lot of upkeep and maintenance. I'm going to give it high points because it has the capabilities. but it puts the onus of taking care of that sorting on you after the fact, which makes it a

9:09 little bit complicated. And sometimes you can just have too many folders and folders on top of folders on top of folders. And a lot of people will then defer to coming into the all iCloud and just searching here instead, which again, searching is fine. But one of my big philosophies is sort, don't search. And in order to do that with notes, You just got to have a lot of free time. So I'm going to give Notes three Steves in this category. Now let's come into Reminders and let's see how the sorting and filing is over here. Wow. Right off the bat, as soon as you open it up, things are put away. Things aren't loose in some random folder. Everything's got its own list. Everything's got its own category. Reminders is based on lists, making it easy for

9:57 you to have one list for your bills and another list for items you want to purchase, or Siri shortcuts you want to create, or honey-do tasks you've got to accomplish. It's like there is no sorting because it's automatically sorted. As soon as you create a reminder, if you don't specifically put it into a list, it goes into your default list, which for me is called "This Week", which means it's sorted in its own way. Now, in a lot of cases, I'll put a bunch of reminders in and then put them into separate places, but there's some really easy tools that we'll talk about in the MacWhisperer power tip for automatically adding something directly into a list. So I think Reminders gets a win on this one with five Steves for almost perfect filing and

10:44 sorting, making it easy to keep your separate lists separated and get whatever you need to do done. And our final category is Productivity. And by productivity, what I mean is how good is it at keeping track of your tasks and helping you accomplish projects. So let's hop into Notes and see how good it is. Notes has an easy way that you can create to-do lists or checklists by clicking the little checklist button on your formatting bar right here. When you do a checklist, it makes it easy to click on something and it will drop right down to the bottom of the checklist so that you can complete the next task and the next task, and the next one. Notes also has such powerful formatting that

11:29 you can easily indent a task in case it's a subtask of something else. By swiping right on the text from the left to the right, you can indent it to help you keep track of subtasks within a particular task. Which is great, and you can go several levels deep in this indentation. But one of the problems is, you can't close those subtasks. They always sit right here, and it's not really easy to move things around. You can double click on stuff, and Drag it, but it's a little clunky and it's not perfect in the way it moves things around, which means if you want to reorganize something based on priority or based on date or any other topic, it's just pretty hard. And the subtasks don't look great

12:14 within the tasks. It just feels like things are a little less perfect. For a quick to do list, it's great, write them down, check them off and be done. But for a complicated project This just isn't good enough. And sure, there are all kinds of different productivity projects. In some cases, you may need to capture a whole lot of information of a class you're taking or things you're learning, and you can use notes to write that down really well. But when you want to accomplish things, the checklist just isn't powerful enough. In this case, good enough just kind of isn't good enough. I'm going to give it a Steve and a half. Let's hop over to Reminders and see how it does. Here we are in Reminders, and as I've talked about before, there are multiple lists that

13:01 help you accomplish different things. What's great about these lists is that any given list can have sub lists within it. I'm going to go into my big MacWhisperer project, and you'll see here, not only do I have these separate columns that I can move things from one column to the next on right from my phone, right from my iPad, but I can also add a sub task. to any specific task just by dropping it in. And if I need to reorganize something, all I have to do is click on it, and move it, and it moves right out of the way, whether it's moving up and down in its list, or left and right in the column. It's super easy to create these projects and make them perfect. You can take any specific task, And just connect it to any other task just like that.

13:47 And then the ability to share it with people by clicking this button right here and collaborating with others on your task means that the next time the handyman comes to your house, you've already got your list ready for him with all the separate tasks and subtasks. Everything can be right in one place Easy for him to accomplish and keep track of on his phone, which just isn't quite the same as how Notes works. When it comes to productivity, Reminders rules supreme. It is a toolbox filled with every tool you could need to get any project accomplished from an around the house project. to an extremely complicated website and course project. Reminders just can't be taken down on this category, and it gets five Steves for

14:34 keeping it simple and keeping me on task. So who won? Who cares? It's probably just a flat out tie because Notes and Reminders are both so powerful, but it's like trying to compare a screwdriver and a wrench. They're both great tools, they're just used for different projects. So what kind of projects is Notes best for? Notes is best for long form projects, long documents that require formatting, maybe collaboration and sharing. It's a great program to use to Take notes. I mean, it's in the name, right? It's a great place to put those ideas. Anything you want to search for easily, anything you want to refer back to and read again or share with others, notes wins.

15:20 What works best in Reminders? Any project that you're going to complete, anything that you're going to cross off, whether it's that list of books that you want to read, or that complicated home remodeling project. Reminders is great because not only can you cross things off, but it can even alert at a day, on a time, or at a location, meaning that when you put together your to do list and you happen to be at the grocery store, it can say, hey, you need milk, which Notes is never going to do. Notes is great, but you've got to go to Notes to get the information. Reminders comes to you. So it's not one or the other, it's how to use both and integrate them together to create a perfect productivity system. Now, in just a moment, I'm going to share my

16:07 MacWhisperer power tip. But before I do, what'd you think of today's lesson? How about giving it a thumbs up if you learned something amazing and drop into the comment section and ask any questions about specific projects so that I can help you really learn when notes is right and when reminders is right. And while you're down there, if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, why not? Are you waiting for a sign? Here, this is your sign. It's time to subscribe. And without further ado, let's get into the MacWhisperer Power Tip. Notes and reminders, reminders and notes, they're both great. So what am I going to talk about in this Power Tip, huh?

16:53 How about Siri? How about what happens when you add Siri to either notes or reminders. Reminders work so well with Siri. By pressing the side button or saying your magic words, you can easily have Siri remind me to call my dad tomorrow or add bananas to my grocery list or remind me that I need milk when I arrive at Ralph's. Just like that, super, super simply, Siri is a godsend when it comes to reminders. The best way to use Siri with reminders is to start by saying, remind me, and then whatever

17:39 it is you want to be reminded about, and how you'd like to be reminded. Either a date, a time, a location, or even when you're messaging a specific contact. The other awesome thing you can do with Siri is if you want to add a reminder into a specific list, all you have to do is say, add, whatever it is, to, whatever the list is called, list. So it might look something like, add coffee to my grocery list. Just like that. Super easy, super simple. And when it comes to notes, Siri's got some powerful tricks too. It's as simple as saying show my notes about Julie. And there's my list without my even having

18:25 to lift a finger and I can come right in and click any one of these notes and it'll pop right up and I'll be right in it easily. That's Siri's superpower, keeping it super simple. And you can even have Siri create a new note by simply saying Create a note called things I want to talk about in my YouTube class tomorrow. And just like that, my note is started and I can continue it with dictation or anything else that I want to do. Siri is a powerful component of the Reminders Notes ecosystem. So don't forget to use Siri for both Notes and Reminders so that all of your projects get accomplished and you have easy access to any of the

19:11 documents in your Notes application with just the power of your voice. That's what we've got for today's lesson comparing Notes and Reminders. I'm Dylan Stewart, The MacWhisperer, and it's my passion and profession to help you get more done with your Apple products than you ever thought possible. And I will see you next time. Hey everyone, it's Dylan here. Did you learn something cool and fun in this lesson? If you love learning about Apple products, I've got a great opportunity for you. I have a live course that I'm offering called the iPhone Master Class. It's an awesome course that will teach you everything you need to know about the iPhone, whether you're a newbie or a veteran. It'll teach you great troubleshooting tips and how to work the iPhone.

19:57 like a master. If you'd like to join the course, drop into the description section down below. There's a link there. And if you act quick, there might even be a discount in it for you. I appreciate you guys. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time.