To misquote a famous Star Wars character - "There is no ‘best’ - there is only try".

No one app stands out as the ‘best’ in any situation - the best for me personally may be something completely different from what appeals to you.

Do you want AI features or not? Something which is available on any device / any OS / anywhere, or just something to run on your own mobile. Free or expensive? Calendar? To-do lists? Are you an IT guru, or just starting to learn?

So many variables, so little time… (yep - another misquote)

So: there’s ‘try’ - look at what’s available to you. Search the internet, ask in any forums you’re connected to (brownie points on that one), but also: pick an app and try it out now so you start to see what’s available, and can maybe frame questions with more detail so you don’t get lectured by people like me.

Don’t expect permanence by the way - software companies come and go; sometimes because they don’t sell enough products, their features don’t measure up in the market, or they’re owned (or bought up) by a major player like Google or Microsoft and then discarded some time later because the operation doesn’t fit with a change in strategy…

I can’t count how many different products I’ve used in my life (I’ve been around for a while) and the ‘best’ I remember was Borland Sidekick - but despite several buyouts and iterations, it’s not been available for years.

Currently I use two linked products:
  • Evernote, because it’s very easy to pull information in from anywhere - by copy/ paste, import, drag-n-drop etc - it’s very searchable. Even casual photographs containing text are OCR’d and indexed. And it supports (depending on your account type) up to 100,000 notes containing multiple documents, images, sound files, scanned items and notes up to 200MB in size.
  • Workflowy, because it also has a killer search function, some extra layout and linking tricks, and is blindingly fast on any device.

The two link together so I can leverage the speed and features of both. Evernote notes are linked from WF and vice-versa.

You’ll also need some sort of strategy to organise your information - headings (titles), notebooks, or tags to tie common themes together - but that’s a whole other long answer.

If you’re just starting out - pick something and use it; like riding a bike, theory is good, but actual experience will keep you (and your data) safe!


PS always make sure you can get your data OUT of any app you’re using - sometimes providers like to ‘lock’ users into their product by just making that process annoyingly hard.