Meet Francesco from Keep Productive
Hello there, my name's Francesco D'Alessio and I run a YouTube channel called Keep Productive.
I've been here on Scott's channel before to do some features, and I'm excited to be back.
Today, I'm gonna be diving into Amplenote.
Scott will be diving into his opinion on Amplenote over on my channel, Keep Productive, so you can check out that video below, naturally.
If you're new to both Scott and I's channel, it'd be great to have you as a subscriber.
Overview of Amplenote workflow
So Amplenote is an application that blends note taking and task management.
It has a two-week trial, and if you wanted to go for the Basic and Pro account, it's $6 per month and $10 per month, but you'll find all the pricing information below.
So before we get into stuff like that, we'll talk about the application and the concepts behind it and really go into a bit more detail in what the application actually does.
If you're interested, this app was actually created by the creators of Get Clear and Bonanza.com, Bill and Jordan, and it is available on iOS and Android and also on web.
So the whole concept is quite interesting. It's designed and based off of something called the idea execution funnel.
The concept itself is broken into four phases: Jots, Notes, Tasks, and Calendar.
Essentially in Jots, you write and capture. In Notes, you rewrite them and organize them.
In Tasks, you make them more actionable, and then you actually schedule them and do them, connecting it to your Calendar.
So here we have the web version in front of me. It's only available for a 14-day free trial, as I said two weeks, and then there is a paid model, so the minimum you'll be paying a month is $6.
However, if you do get on with this, I guess it's like a task manager and a note taker all in one which isn't too bad of a price, I guess, and it does have a system and process behind it.
How to create notes in Amplenote
which does make it a lot better. So let's start by creating a brand new note, and as you can see, the design looks very similar to applications like Evernote, where you have these sort of three sections over here.
You can access your Jots, which is essentially your daily note taking, and as the concept mentioned earlier, you essentially use this to capture stuff and be able to write it down, and you can use these using some of the daily Jots here.
Notes is where you write, rewrite, and organize your notes for later. You can add tags to them.
And Tasks is essentially pulling all of the tasks that's inside all of your notes into this application, and they've got some really nice task abilities which I'll dive into.
So let's start by making a daily note. Okay, so as you can see here, when I was inside of Jots, I went ahead and created that as a full note, which meant that it became available inside of the Notes section here.
Now when I was inside of this section, you can do more formatting, the Jots section is really just you get the idea down, so they don't really want you necessarily to be making this fully-formed note as you would in the Note section.
And as you can see here, I added a few tasks.
Tasks and To-Do's in Amplenote
so let's see the concept behind the tasks. So as you can see here, you can pop open the feature, you can set a repeat up for the task, you can set a due date, in this case, I might make it today.
And as you can see, you can set a reminder, priority, and duration, all the regular stuff you'd expect.
Now what's really cool is it actually gives the task something called a task score, which essentially gives it a rating of how likely you're able to complete it.
And if I go over to the Tasks section, you can see that it's appeared here as well as all of the other ones that I've created in that note.
I can still pop this open and interact with it like I would, and as you can see, it's quite a handy way to get started on your tasks.
Now what's cool is you've got this shortcut called like Due This Week, so for example, if you want to narrow that filter down and find something that you need to do this week, then that's something that you can do.
You can also choose the ones that are high value only. For example, in this case, this is an important task so it's narrowed those down to filter that section.
You can go up to the top right and actually sort the tasks based on their tasks score.
This is an automated number that is associated to a task based on the following algorithm.
It's designed to help you find out what's really important to do.
Using Backlinks within Amplenote
which is quite a nice touch to this application, if I'm honest. So one of the features inside of it, aside from task management and this sort of built-in task management list processing, is actually the ability to create back links.
Now we've seen this inside of applications like Roam Research and Obsidian, but let's show you how they work.
So if you wanna create a back link, you create these two brackets and add the title of the note or link it to something you've already created.
So as you can see there, I created a section using a header for meetings, and you can see that I created a chat with Simpletivity.
Now when I actually finish those brackets, you can see that an area was created, and you can see a little preview of what the note actually has in it, in this case it doesn't have any notes.
I can edit the details of that preview but if I want to actually go into that, as you can see, all I have to do is open that note up and I can start writing my own notes here using the same format I would for most note taking.
Down here you can see the back links that have been formed, so for example in this case, they know that I've mentioned this inside of Daily Jots, which is perfect for if you want to start building something like the Zettelkasten methodology, which is something that is becoming increasingly popular in productivity these days.
So we've talked about so far in terms of the Jots to simply capture stuff, the Notes to simply be able to rewrite your notes and organize them in a bit more of a fixed fashion.
We talked about Tasks and how you can use the task score to work out which stuff you wanna get done during the week, but there's also the ability to connect with your calendar to be able to actually schedule it in.
So when it comes to using Amplenote, you can use it for note taking and task management.
It allows you to do this advanced task management where you can do everything from even hiding your actual task til later which is something that I quite like inside of this application, because it could probably get quite messy if you started filling up notes with tasks.
I feel like this is actually something that applications like Evernote could benefit from massively, having some form of methodology or task system that you could use and take advantage of.
Tags and special features in Amplenote
So before we go, I wanted to point towards some of the features that I really liked inside of this application, particularly the ability to add tags is something that could be quite useful for organizing projects and activities.
They essentially serve as notebooks, and that's something that can be used as you go along.
The other thing I really like is if you go to the top right-hand corner, you can do what's called Applying Vault Encryption.
Now obviously once you have the basic account, I believe that's where you'll be able to access this, but you can see here that you can actually encrypt your notes, which means that the notes won't be stored on the server.
So it says here that the content of the vault-encrypted notes will not preview in your notes list or be matched in searches.
So this is actually a perfect way to keep your notes safer and more secure, away from other prying eyes. I really like this focus on security that they have.
The other thing I really like is the fact that down here you've got hidden, completed, and back links, all really nicely organized, ready for later, and I also like the search bar for being able to find and organize
Amplenote pricing plans and options
your notes for later, and it actually was really easy to use. So this application is still in its early days, so let's take a look at the pricing.
As you can see here, there are three types of pricing: Basic, Pro, and Founder.
With the Basic one, it's near enough $6 per month. It's billed annually, and it allows you to collaborate with unlimited users, use some of the task scheduling and recurrence, all of the notes encrypted at client, and up to 10 gigabytes storage for attachments.
The Pro is billed at $10 per month but billed annually. All the benefits of the Basic, and that means that you will have to upgrade to this account to get the Vault Notes for sensitive content.
You'll also have publish your notes as web links and up to 25 gig for storage.
Now if I'm honest, the pricing is pretty steep for this one, however they are an independent developer, so as you can imagine, this app is something that they're working on and improving and at quite a rapid rate.
And if you compare it to apps like say Roam, it's still cheaper.
But if you're going for the Founder plan, which is $20 per month billed annually, then naturally it's gonna be more expensive than the likes of Roam Research.
So folks, if you're looking for a note-taking application that has some really cool task management abilities within it, that totally utilizes back links, and it has more of a focus on security and you're willing to pay up to $10 per month, this could be a great option for you.
So folks, I just wanted to thank Scott for having me here on the channel.
I love coming on, I'm excited for his feature over on my channel, so make sure you subscribe to both of us, but a big thanks to Scott.
We'll talk very soon, I'm sure me and Scott will work on some collaborations in the near future, but sending my best to you all, and I hope to see you in the comments below.
Cheerio, folks.
