List-Taking and Note-Taking
Why you should do both
Nestful is very list-centric. Even the Kanban and Agenda views are just horizontal lists of vertical lists, and Nestful’s free-form text, the description field, is very limited. This avoidance in on purspose, a result of trial and error.
Before building Nestful, I had used some note-based competitors only to realize they weren’t competitors at all. Note-taking is a form of knowledge organization that is almost entirely orthogonal to list-taking.
When I tried using note-taking solutions exclusively, I found myself trying to recreate the functionality of list-taking inside of a note. While it is technically possible, it breaks down fairly early.
The Role of Notes
Notes are a collection of sections1 that benefit from being a single piece of prose.
An essay such as this blog post is the immediate example, where each paragraph is part of the essay and although it has some meaning by itself, it is significantly reduced.
Job listings, reviews, pitch documents, diary entries, and summaries are more examples that fit note-taking well. They consist of sections that form a whole, with each section losing significance when in isolation.
The Role of Lists
Lists are the exact opposite. They are a collection of items2 that preserve their meaning without being connected by prose.
The immediate list example is a shopping list, where each item has to be acquired regardless of the others.
I know what you’re thinking — a grocery list may have items dependant on one another if they are part of the same recipe. For example, if I want to make cookies and there aren’t any eggs available, I won’t need the sugar.
As long as you want to make cookies, you’re going to need sugar and eggs. The lack of eggs does not cancel the sugar, it just means that you have to look for eggs elsewhere. If eggs are hard to find, you may give up on making cookies, but that’s not sugar being dependent on eggs, that’s the ingredients depending on the recipe.
Even if you don’t think about it that way, a grocery list is a list of lists. Every item in that list is going to be used in the preparation of food, and therefore is part of a recipe.
This is where note-taking doesn’t fit. Notes cannot differentiate independent sections from interconnected ones, something that is explicit in lists.
Nestful uses that list-taking extensively. If you have lists of tasks nested into one another, Nestful allows you to “bubble up” due items by setting a due date. No matter how deep a task is nested, an agenda view will show it to you when it’s due. This is made possible by a list’s explicit division into items. In our grocery list example, one could add recipes, and the groceries will “bubble up” to form the list.
It’s a Spectrum
The division of content into lists and notes is not binary. Some fit into both.
While in my opinion a screenplay’s outline benefits tremendously from being a list, and should only become prose in the case of writing a treatment (or the actual screenplay). Some screenwriters prefer to outline as prose. That is fine.
The nice thing about it being a spectrum is that if you have content that’s not a clear fit for either, either will work, as it’s probably in the middle of the spectrum.
Use the right tool for the job.
It used to be just paragraphs, which are sections of just text, but since then sections have expanded to include various other forms of data presentation, such as tables or media.
Although list items and note sections are technically different, you can think of them as the same thing for the sake of this essay.