I’ve come to really enjoy Bear again after a brief hiatus. I tried my best to use Apple Notes but started to find it slowed me down when I tried organising my Notes. The most powerful feature of Bear for me is quickly being able to organise your notes.

I’ve found that being able to quickly add a ‘#’ to the end of a note to quickly organise my Notes into ‘folders’. I started with looking at it around my writing in ‘draft’ ‘blog’ and ‘published’.

As I started to build up my Notes and everything went in Bear more tags appeared. You can see above my total list so far, it’s constantly evolving and I’m enjoying this way of organising.

I’m trying to stay off Social media a bit more limiting myself to about 20 minutes a day. The side effect of this is that I’m blogging more short form thoughts, which is good. This has meant that I’ve been using the Wordpress app as a replacement for writing down quick thoughts.

With the most recent announcement from Bear and Wordpress that they were more closely integrated I had to give it a go and it’s been working pretty great. After a little hiatus I’m back using Bear, with its tagging and theme options it’s working well with how my brain works. The only downside that I’ve found is that the post when put into the Wordpress share sheet interface doesn’t remove tags so you’ll need to remember to do this yourself. It even works with images, like the screen shots I’m adding below. I’ve found even just in the day using this method it’s going to be a lot smoother than using the Wordpress app itself.

Somethings clicked for me with the notes app Bear. I’ve used it before but since trying Drafts and trying to get my head around workspaces I went back to try Bear and it suddenly makes sense for me. With its iCloud sync and support for the Apple Pencil and Attachments it fits my need for a better looking Notes app than Apple Notes.

The main reason I’m using it is tags - it’s really pretty simple. Every time you create a note add a tag to help organise.

Here’s my setup (so far), you can see that I have already started to organise my notes by tags and when I tap on any of them all I see is the notes with that tag. This is something I struggled with when using Drafts and gave up trying to get my head around with how workspaces worked.

The main tag I’m using is ‘blog’, anytime I get an idea (like this one) I start a new note with my heading of what I want to write about and add the tag ‘blog’. When I’m in the mood to do something for the blog I can simply tap the ‘blog’ tag and see everything I’ve started on.

Just like in this image.

Another tag I’m finding useful is ‘reading’ where I’m importing entire articles from the web to keep and read later then delete of have as reference. This is done via shortcuts, I’ll write up a post on this in the coming weeks.

Are you using Bear? How is your setup?