Turn a Note into a Project (and vice versa)

It would be wonderful to see an option where one could turn a Note into a Category or into a Project – and vice versa for that matter.

This would make the very structuring of thoughts a lot easier and at the same time it would feel more natural, since in your head you’re able to do that very quickly.

I’m using agenda as a means to structure my life using 12 different Categories with a couple of Projects each. Ever Project again tends to have several Notes inside.

Indeed adding the option to move a note to a new project would make sense. Less so to a category I’d say. We’ll see if this can be added.

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Just to make sure I’m not being misunderstood:

  • Yes that would indeed make sense as well, to be able to move a note into another project.

  • But I am talking about converting a note into a project or converting a project into a note, so you could change the level of organization and organize single thoughts better within the structure

  • Making the boundaries inside the organizational structure more permeable – thus making the structure more flexible would be the major factor in this change

What are your thoughts? :slightly_smiling_face:

  1. Converting a note into a project.

I think this would make sense to add, especially because it could fit within the “Move to” option, which currently allows you to move to a different project but could easily have the option to move to a new project, which gives you the “convert note to project” option. It would simply move the note to a newly created project.

  1. Converting a project to a note

I don’t think this makes too much sense to be honest. Splitting of a note to a new project makes sense, consolidating a project into a single note in some other project isn’t as common I would suspect.

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Hi Alex, what about the possibility to convert a note into a reminder, and vice versa? As I already posted somewhere in the blog, I think this could make the workflow more flexible. I noticed that sometimes I make a double note/reminder on the same topic.

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what about the possibility to convert a note into a reminder, and vice versa?

You can already create a new note containing the reminder by clicking in the calendar in the inspector on the right. The other way around, converting a note into a reminder doesn’t make sense to me tbh. What would happen with the note, and where would the reminder go? How do you deal with large notes, and loss of attachments, text etc. I just can’t see the usecase of when you’d want to convert a note into a reminder but perhaps you can give an example.

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Yes, it makes sense. Sometimes I have short notes, almost only the title or a concise text after that. I was thinking about the possibility of converting this kind of note into reminders.

I can see how you could paddle back and decide to just turn them into a reminder in the end, but don’t think there’s a common workflow there. If the note is small the gain is relatively small and there’s simply to many gotchas and variations to do something with a single action I’m afraid.

Yes, I understand the point. Actually, another question, talking more in general about the interaction between Notes and Reminders, is that when you make a reminder completed, it disappears from the Agenda. It is visible only inside Apple Reminders. When you set a note as done, it remains still visible in a project inside Agenda. If I am not wrong, no traces of Reminders can be found in the Agenda when you completed them, and this makes me all the time uncertain if I should make a note or a reminder to recall something later. Because this recall could always be updated or, in any case, be a trace of a work process.

That’s correct, once reminders are marked as done they will disappear from the calendar in the inspector on the right. Mind you, they are still there inside the note (the reminder icon marked as done). Perhaps down the line we can offer more options what you want to do with reminders marked as done in the calendar. I understand from your that you’d like to stay visible?

That is correct. One of the problems with Reminders at present is the fact that once used, you waste them because there is not an easy way to keep track.
With notes, you can easily trace them back inside the Projects or with Search All. If I use a Reminder to update an event quickly in a note, this reminder is on the calendar side and appears like another step of my workflow. However, I can’t record it permanently inside my workflow. If I want to check back on the process of an entire (or part of a) project, I can go through the Notes but not easily through the Reminders. They look like, to say, some missed rings in a chain of the specific work process of a project. My concern is that if I trust too much on the Reminders, the risk is a certain point to miss some workflow steps when I look back to it. I don’t know if I am clear enough, I am just trying to explain why I am uncertain when I use Reminders. I have just the feeling they are still not well integrated with the excellent mechanic of the relationship between Notes and Calendar on Agenda.

Doesn’t that option already exist?
I’ve just moved a note into a newly created project.
But the note is still a note – so you were probably saying that in the future this would turn the note into a project…

I can imagine that this kind of conversion raises some questions as to how it would work exactly. For instance:

“where does the text of the notes go when a new project is created?”

  • I would make that a new project + a note with the headline + the text

“What happens with all the formatting?”
– I would keep all the formatting, all the headlines H1 I would use as separators four single notes. That would mean that one note with three headlines and texts after each headline would then become one project +3 notes with text.

… I am sure there are more… But are you able to see the value in that?

You can see, that I’m trying to keep the workflow as simple as possible.
I have been doing all the steps continuously by myself. And I would be happy to have a workflow or an option to make that quicker.

Also I am sure and everybody could benefit from an option like that.

Ah! I missed that, but yes it’s already there.

Yes, I can see the value in your workflow no doubt, the problem is however that it very much depends on how you use headings, and everybody might do this differently. I don’t think there’s a common enough standard for that to work reliably for a lot of people. What if the note doesn’t have any headings, what happens then? What if you expect things to break also on H2 headings, etc.

To be honest I think the route here would be to use automation, either via x-callback-urls or (down the line) a native Shortcuts action. You would read the content of a note (which is something we want to make possible), parse it in the script/Shortcuts on whichever separator you want, and have it create the corresponding project.

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