I wouldn’t be able to function as an adult without the Notes app

‘Finish Metro article’, 

‘Book GP app tomorrow at 8am!!’ 

‘Cocopopsnappiespasta’

‘Hang washing morning mark books TONIGHT.’

On any given day, the Notes app on my phone reads a little something like that. 

Word vomit, with added actual vomit, courtesy of my toddler.

This innocuous little thing, hovers on my phone amongst the nondescript default apps I’ve never opened, bestowed free to all, without a hint of its transformational promise. 

It has gone from something I barely knew was there in my teenage years, when my phone was mainly used for chatting to my friends despite having just spent all day at school with them, and listening to music downloaded from whatever dubious site was popular that week, to the main way I manage to function as an adult today.

A half-formed article on the bus? Jot it down next to tomorrow’s shopping list and a random recommendation of a TV show from a friend. 

Need to remind myself to pay a bill? Chuck it in the Notes app along with a frantic list of my child’s diarrhoea symptoms and the name of a restaurant I’ve seen on Instagram that I swear I’ll one day visit, but almost certainly never will. 

As a teenager and even (shamefully) throughout university, my mum was my human Notes app. She kept tabs of all the little details that my brain didn’t register, like appointments and deadlines, on the kitsch calendar pinned to the kitchen wall.

Through becoming a teacher in 2016, a mum in 2021, and going freelance last year (in other words a Real Adult) – I found there was all this information rattling around my brain that I just couldn’t juggle anymore. 

It was like I needed some kind of external harddrive to store it all in without me trying, and failing, to remember it all.

When I attempted this mental reorganisation, my first port of call was not an app. 

It was the old school way: Pretty little notebooks with handwritten lists. 

I spent more money than I care to admit on the best quality paper and the most ornate covers, convinced that with the right diary I’d finally be on top of things. 

Surely if I wrote my to-do lists in gold fountain pen I’d remember to do everything on them, right?

Wrong.

Each night, as l lay in bed, I make a habit of scrolling through my Notes from that day – ticking things off and underlining things to do tomorrow

Invariably, I’d leave the notebook containing my carefully handcrafted shopping list at home or I’d forget whether I wrote that really important phone number on yesterday’s list or the day before or the day before that. 

I soon realised that, for better or worse, the only item I obsessively made sure I had with me at all times was my phone – and therefore the solution to my successful adulting could not lie in gorgeous notebooks, but in the device that never left my side.

Somewhere around 2018, I opened the previously ignored Notes app, and a whole world of organisational possibility unfurled before me. 

I could change fonts and text sizes and add neat little ticks and bullet points without ripping out entire pages just because I’d smudged one letter.

I could create little categories and sections but keep everything accessible on one page. 

It was slightly embarrassing to try and recruit friends and colleagues to the benefits of the Notes app with the zeal of a religious convert only to realise they already knew about it. 

Of course they did. Everyone did. And most people were sceptical when I described it as the way to keep on top of my chaotic life. 

Regardless of what the septics say, I remain loyal to my trusty little app.

Each night, as l lay in bed, I make a habit of scrolling through my Notes from that day – ticking things off and underlining things to do tomorrow.

And more than once (OK, more times than I can count) it has saved me from  disaster the next day.

It has prompted me to chase an unpaid invoice that I needed to pay a bill by a specific date and make sure I booked my son’s vaccine appointments on time. 

Most of all, it means that I can go to sleep knowing that everything I need to know is safely contained in one place on my phone – ready for me to add to the next day when things inevitably crop up again.

These days, it feels like it’s more progressive to see our reliance on our phones in a negative light. 

There’s a school of thought that we should all eschew our smartphones and go back to brick phones – and, I suppose, using real calculators and compasses and notebooks and cameras and all the other things that are contained in one handy device now. 

We are painfully aware that phones are inhibiting our lives as humans rather than enhancing them – making us all more anxious and self-centred and anti-social as a result.

And that’s definitely true in some cases, but for the permanently unorganised like me, phones are a (proverbial) life-saver. 

For all the times I resolve to delete social media and limit my screen time, I know the one thing I cannot restrict is my Notes app usage.

Without my Notes app, I’d have a shopping list written on my hand and an important phone number on a random scrap of tissue that I’d absentmindedly use to wipe my son’s snot five minutes later, and I’d still be sending half-formed article ideas in a text to my husband just so I had somewhere to store them. 

So yes, admittedly the Notes app is not quite literally something I physically cannot live without. 

But if you saw me try to function as an adult without it, you certainly wouldn’t doubt its importance.

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