Apple Notes Is a Scam

I escaped to Notion and rebuilt the exact same mess, just with a monthly invoice attached.

I spent a weekend last winter building the perfect system in Notion. Databases, relations, a dashboard with rollups I did not fully understand, the lot. The plan was simple. I was finally going to escape Apple Notes, which by then had become a place where thoughts went to die, and move my whole brain into something that respected me. For about a month, it worked. I felt organised in the way you feel organised right after tidying a room you are about to mess up again.

Photo by Omar Al-Ghosson on Unsplash

Then I caught myself doing something small. I had tapped open a fresh page in Notion, no database, no tags, no status, just a blank space to dump a thought I would sort out later. I looked at it for a second and felt the floor go out from under the whole project. I had not escaped anything. I had rebuilt the exact same dumping ground inside a tool I was now paying for. The blank page had simply followed me, wearing a more expensive coat.

That was the moment I stopped blaming myself and started looking harder at the app I had run from.

The note I could not outrun

There is a note on my phone called “misc”. I could not tell you when it started. I would have to scroll to even find out what is in the top half of it, and I am fairly sure some of it refers to a version of my life that no longer exists. I have never once opened it on purpose. It just sits there, getting longer, and for years, I treated its existence as proof that I was the problem.

Here is what I want to argue, and it is harder than “Notes gets messy”. Plenty of apps get messy. My claim is that Apple Notes is built to produce a “misc”, and that the mess is not a flaw in the experience. It is the experience. An app that is this easy to pour things into and this quietly difficult to leave is not failing to organise you. It is doing precisely what it was designed to do, which is to hold you.

The frictionless front door

Think about how a note begins. You tap once, and you write. You do not name it. You do not file it. You are never once asked what this thing is or where it belongs.

That is sold as kindness, and on the surface it is. Capture should be quick. The problem is that everything which makes capture quick also makes finding things later impossible. A system that never asks you what something is at the moment you make it cannot help you locate it at the moment you need it. The cost of the easy front door is paid months later, by a version of you who has forgotten the thing was ever written down.

None of this is presented to you as a choice. The app is perfectly happy to let a single note swell to a thousand lines and it will never, not once, suggest this might be a problem. That silence is not neglect. It is the design working.

Search is what lets the rot grow

The clever part is search, and search is exactly what keeps a “misc” alive.

When you can find anything, you never have to throw anything away. You stop pruning, stop archiving, stop making the small ongoing decisions that keep any system honest. Everything stays, because deleting feels like a risk and searching feels free. The more that accumulates, the more indispensable the app becomes, because now your whole scattered head lives in there and nowhere else.

That is the trick worth noticing. The value of Notes to you climbs in direct proportion to how disorganised it has become. A tidy Notes with ten entries is something you could walk away from this afternoon. A years-deep account with a thousand-line “misc” at the bottom is a different thing entirely. You are not a user any more. You are a tenant who has lost the deposit.

Try to leave

Here is the test of the whole thing. Try to walk out with your stuff.

There is no honest export. You cannot lift your notes out as clean, portable files in any form that keeps their shape, partly because there is barely a shape to keep. You can copy and paste, one note at a time, which is its own quiet punishment. You can lean on third-party tools that scrape and convert and mangle the formatting on the way out. What you cannot do is press one button and walk away whole.

Sync makes the hold tighter, and sync is the thing everyone praises. Your notes follow you to the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, the watch. It feels like freedom. It is the opposite. The more places a thing lives, the more leaving it costs, because you are no longer closing an app, you are unplugging from every screen you own at once. A cage stops feeling like a cage when it is also the most convenient room in the house.

What Notion actually taught me

So I left, and the lesson waiting for me in Notion was not the one I went looking for.

The trap was never really the app. It was the habit of capturing without ever deciding, and no software fixes a decision you keep refusing to make. Notion did not save me from Notes. It charged me a monthly fee to teach me the same thing about myself, slightly more expensively. The villain and the supposed hero were running the identical play. One of them just had better marketing and an invoice at the end of it.

Which means the fix was never going to be a prettier folder structure I would abandon in a fortnight. If the real problem is delayed deciding, the only thing that helps is something that makes the decision for you, automatically, at the moment a thought arrives, so it never has to land in a “misc” in the first place.

That is the work I have spent a long while on, and it is why my Apple Shortcuts guide exists. It is not really about organising your notes. It is about letting your phone do the boring filing the second something turns up, so the dumping ground never has the chance to form. If that is the loop you keep getting stuck in, it is over here, and it will save you the weekend I lost building a more expensive version of the same mistake:

Get it here: apple-shortcuts-mastery

The “misc” note is still there. Still growing. I keep it now on purpose, as a reminder rather than a system. It is the clearest proof I own of what an app will quietly let you do to yourself, when its real job was never to organise you, but to keep you.