Part 5: Find and Organize Notes (Lists and Kanban boards)

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Once you reached a critical number of notes it becomes gradually harder to find anything in the sidebar. That’s where the command bar, note properties, and folder views will help you. 

Command bar: Find Notes Quickly

Hit  CMD+J to open the Command Bar and start typing the name of the note you are looking for. You will see search results appearing immediately without having to wait. (NotePlan has indexed all your notes.)

The Command Bar also returns partial results, so you don’t have to remember the exact name of the note and can have typos:

Hit enter to open the first note in the search results (or navigate with the arrow keys). 

If you don’t enter any text, it will display the recently edited notes. This is practical if you have a project note you update very often. Then you don’t need to search for it.

Tip: You can make it easier to find something when you are creating many small notes using very descriptive names instead of very few big notes with generic names. 

What about daily notes? You can also type in a date to jump quickly to a specific daily note like “2nd March 2021” or “2021-03-02” or even “tomorrow”, “next week”, “friday”.

Folder Views & Note Properties (List or Kanban)

Folder Views help you organize your notes by grouping, filtering, and sorting them using existing or custom properties. You can view either your notes or the tasks inside them — displayed as a list or a Kanban board for project management.

Here’s how to use them:

  • Click any folder in your sidebar that already contains a few notes (you can also click the “Notes” or “Calendar Notes” title).
  • In the top-left View menu, choose what to display — Notes or Tasks — and select your preferred layout: List or Cards (Kanban).
  • Start grouping and filtering by built-in or custom note properties to create the perfect overview.

Add note properties to your notes. For project notes, include properties like status, category, and owner, then create a Kanban board to manage them effectively.

For example:

  • status: todo, in progress, done
  • category: marketing, design, development
  • owner: alice, bob, carol

Use different icons and background colors to distinguish note types. For example: Strategy Notes = blue, Project Notes = green, Meeting Notes = cyan.

You can find the properties bar at the top of each note.

It's your turn

Press CMD+J to search for a note. Then add properties to it — start with status — so you can build a Kanban board to keep track of your projects.

In the next email you will learn how to find and filter tasks spread across different notes.

Pro Tips

  • Use the AI assistant to automatically generate note properties. It analyzes the current note and similar notes in the same folder to suggest consistent properties.
  • In a folder’s Kanban board view, you can create empty columns to set up your workflow, then drag notes between columns to update their status.
  • Press CMD+T anytime to jump to today’s note — no need to open the Command Bar.

Next up: → Part 6: Search & Review

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