What is YANA?
YANA is my personal notetaking/organization app. You can find it here.
YANA lets you highlight text, then apply tags to that text. You can then sort through your highlights by those tags.
Why make my own notetaking app? What’s wrong with everything on the market?
Nothing, really. As far as I can tell, Evernote/Google Keep/Todoist work great for plenty of people. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them.
I’ve struggled to stay organized since elementary school. My sixth grade teacher, looking at my pigsty of a desk, asked me, “What’s so hard about putting your papers into the correct folders?” I spent recess inside that day watching her sort my papers.
Despite her generous instruction, I never did get used to folders. And unfortunately, most organizational apps are centered around exactly that — folders.
It looks to me like organizational apps are being built for organized people. The problem isn’t that they’re not powerful — they are! But that power is locked behind a labyrinth of folders and menus, and only organized people are good with those, and what’s the point of an organizational app if it can’t help unorganized people?
YANA is (trying to be) an organizational app for unorganized people. Here’s how.
Stream of consciousness
I’ve never seen the inside of an organized person’s brain, so I’d have no way to know this, but I suspect they think differently from us unorganized folk. Take a look at these super organized notes:
To make something this well ordered, you create categories first, then you put things into the categories. There’s this cognitive step where you take the stuff you’re organizing, think about how to organize them, create the categories, then put the things into the appropriate buckets.
Some people are very good at that; I’m not.
To put all this in very concrete terms, look at how an organized person arranges their desk. They have file folders on top, little pouches for their stationery, and maybe an accordion file for other documents.
Contrast that to an unorganized person just putting things everywhere. Homework? That can go in the left corner of the desk. Pencils? I’ll put my sharp ones here, and the dull ones there. Paperwork? The desk seems full…I’ll stick it under my homework.
“I’ll know where to find it later!” As if.
Organized people categorize first. Unorganized people put things down and try to categorize after the fact.
YANA tries to let you capture your thoughts like an unorganized person shoves things into their desk. Just write your thoughts down. Don’t worry about putting your political thoughts all on one note, or in one folder. You can stick your side project ideas with your shopping list with your political theories with your personal reflections. The philosophy is, write now, organize later.
Here’s an example, pulled straight from my YANA.
There’s personal projects mixed with to-do lists mixed with chores mixed with product ideas mixed with weird theories.
I don’t know if I can speak for all unorganized people, but this is a very good representation of my thought process. If you froze time and took a snapshot of my brain, it would look something like this. It certainly wouldn’t look like the super neat stats notes I showed earlier.
How?
How does YANA capture your unorganized thoughts?
It’s very simply. You just write down your thoughts as they come. The highlighting/tagging system allows you to categorize your thoughts after the fact! Much like a messy person slapping post-its all over their desk, only you have a magical hashmap to help you find things faster.
This way, you can mix your diary entries, product ideas, shopping lists, and chores — while still being able to sort through them later!
Closing Words
Go and give it a try! Don’t delete your cookies because it stores your notes in localstorage (for now, until I set up a backend to store cloud saves).
EDIT: Cloud saves are enabled! You can now access your notes from any device. Go ahead and delete cookies if you want.
You can find YANA here.
