digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Process your digital notes during a weekly review by clearing your default Inbox notebook, giving each note a clear title, turning actionable notes into tasks, and filing each one into the project notebook where it will be useful. Tiago Forte demonstrates this using Evernote, Things, and Notion over nine notes from one week, noting this was below his usual average. The goal is an empty Inbox at the end of the review.
Key Points
- Treat the Inbox as the default catch-all: it collects anything sent to Evernote from the browser, email, or other sources, so the weekly review starts from one centralized list.
- Process notes oldest to newest, the same way you would work through email, so nothing lingers.
- Rename auto-generated titles (Evernote takes the first line) to a short, straightforward description of what the note contains.
- When a note implies an action, create a task that links back to the note rather than leaving the action buried in the note itself.
- File each note into a project notebook; if no notebook exists for the topic, create one and place it in the relevant folder.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Open the Inbox notebook in Evernote and work through notes from oldest to newest.
- For each note, change the title to a simple description, such as "Notes on using DSLR camera as webcam."
- If the note needs an action, click the note, choose "Copy note link," then open Things' Quick Capture and enter the task title (e.g., "Review these notes on using DSLR as webcam"). Press Tab to the notes section, paste the link with Command-V, and click Save.
- Move the note to the matching project notebook. For example, a webcam note went to "The Art of Accomplishment," a container-home note to "Forte Shelter," and a ConvertKit roadmap note to "Forte Academy."
- To create a new project notebook, go to Notebooks, choose "New notebook," name it, set it to private, and place it in the Project Stack folder (a folder holding notebooks for each project).
- Forward emails to your Evernote address to save them as notes, then move them into the relevant notebook.
- Use Control-Return to save a Things task quickly and keep moving.
- For blog or content workflows, copy the note link into Notion as a reminder, then move the note to the relevant blog notebook (Praxis in this case).
- Finish by emptying the Trash so the Inbox is clear for the next week.
- The speaker's own volume: a typical week yields roughly a dozen notes, sometimes up to 20; the demo week had nine, which he called below average.
- A Reddit poll asking how long a weekly review takes was saved and filed into a notebook for the guide itself.
Bottom Line
A weekly review is most effective when every note leaves the Inbox: retitled, linked to a task if needed, and filed into a project notebook, so the Inbox ends the review empty.
