A System of Review

Hello, beautiful community, I’ve made Bear my notes home and put a lot of work into a system that works for me. Any system of notes needs a review, and that is where my Bear system is lacking, so I am here to see if anyone can offer help, advice, or if I can bring a request to the developers.

I’ve created a lot of notes. I capture in Drafts usually and try to whittle them down there before sending them to Bear for storage and use in my projects. I have three broad categories, and when I am done with a note, I’ve usually drilled the note down to more specific and interconnected categories using tags. The problem is that some of these notes are thousands of words, and it takes time to review them and classify them, and my drafts are piling up with the backlog. So, I came up with a quick Draft Action to classify the note I am looking at into the three broad categories (which I can do at a glance) or archive/delete the note. This solves the Draft backlog, but now the notes live in a semi-unclassified way in Bear. Here’s where a review would be great.

I’m looking for a system that reviews a random selection of these notes daily (think Readwise) so that they don’t become lost in an unsorted pile. Eventually, I’d like to just have a random selection of notes across the entire database, but in the beginning I really just need random notes from the broad categories.

Ideally, this review feature would be right between Notes and Trash in the sidebar: Review or Daily Digest if you’re feeling fancy (looking at you, Reader).

Anyway, thank you for reading along with my post. What are your review systems with Bear, lovely community? I can always adapt!

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You can use Shortcuts to show random notes. (I believe one example is here: Reddit - The heart of the internet). So you can edit this Shortcut to tag some amount of your notes daily or to show them one-by-one as you wish.

I use Bear’s random note widgets for this. You can tailor these widgets to draw from your entire note database or a specific tag. In my case, I created a set of review tags for different areas of my notes in Bear. Once I review a note, I delete the review tag. Works really well. I wrote this blog post about how it works.

Hope this helps!