Things I refuse to keep in my Notes app anymore
Your notes app is brilliant at holding words and hopeless at holding a life. It's where lists go to be written once and never opened again, and somewhere in there is one called Things I Need To Do, last touched in March.
Updated on 18 September 2026
Why a note loses
Nothing in it knows what day it is. A note can't tell you that the dentist is Tuesday, that you've already done the big shop, or that four of the nine things on it belong to a trip you're not taking until June. It's a wall of text with a tick box bolted on.
So you keep making new ones. The old list feels stale, a fresh one feels like progress, and now there are eleven and the thing you're looking for is in the one you didn't open.
A list that sits on a day
The fix is embarrassingly simple: put each thing on the day you mean to do it. Not an hour, a day. Then today's list is actually today's, and the rest waits its turn instead of staring at you.
That's the whole idea behind Cabana. Your lists arrange themselves around your days rather than the other way round, and you can pull back to the week, the month or the whole year when you want to see the shape of things.
Little ones under big ones
Sort the flat is not a task. It's bathroom, bedroom and the drawer of doom, hiding inside one line that you've now rewritten in four different notes.
Tuck the little ones under the big one, three deep if that's what it takes. Tick the big one and everything underneath goes with it. Collapse it when you don't want to look at all of it, which is most of the time.
The things with no day yet
Some things genuinely have no day. Buy a plant. Find a dress for the thing in November. Those wait in a tray beside the month, out of the way but not lost, and you drag one onto a day the moment you're ready for it. A brain dump has somewhere to go that isn't a new note.
Ticking that means something
Every day has a little ring that fills as you go, every category has its own colour, and a finished task is struck through in that colour rather than vanishing. You can see what you did, which is the bit a note takes away from you the second you delete the line.
Move one list over and see
Don't move everything. Pick the list you actually open and type it into a pretend week to see how it feels, or start properly on your phone. You can always go back to a note, but nobody does.