Amplenote Explained 1: Your first week in Amplenote

Amplenote’s first-week setup centers on a simple loop—capture, review, plan—designed to get users productive quickly without getting lost in feature details. The core idea is that tasks should always have a “home” inside notes, and that weekly review should turn a messy stream of captured ideas into a structured system of notes, tags, and scheduled work.

For getting started, Amplenote offers imports from Evernote or any markdown-exporting note app, including attachments. But the guidance here is to delay importing and instead start fresh for a week. That approach accelerates learning of Amplenote’s note-and-task workflow, and it also reveals which existing items are actually revisited versus what can be left behind—useful “spring cleaning” for people who tend to dump most collected items into folders and never open them again.

The capture step begins with daily jots: automatically created notes that appear each day and serve as a default destination for new ideas. On web or desktop, users can type an idea into today’s daily jot and convert it into a task using hotkeys—Command+Enter on macOS or Control+Enter on Windows. Typing again turns the bullet into a task, making it ready for later processing. On mobile, quick add performs the same function, routing the task into today’s daily jot by default. Desktop clients also support a custom keyboard shortcut to capture from anywhere.

Because tasks must live inside notes, Amplenote forces a destination at capture time. Daily jots are recommended because they’re easy to access and are typically the default. Daily jots are ordinary notes under the hood, viewable in “jots mode” or editable in “notes mode,” but they’re created and tagged automatically.

The review step uses “tasks mode” to consolidate tasks from across all notes into a single list. A key move is creating an “inbox” shortcut by filtering tasks to the daily jots tag, then saving that filtered view to shortcuts so it opens automatically. Reviewing the inbox means deciding where each captured item belongs—those decisions shape the eventual structure of the user’s Amplenote workspace.

Examples show how tasks get reorganized: “buy milk” moves into a new note called “grocery list,” which is then added to shortcuts for quick access. A home-office chair task moves into a “renovate home office” note and gets tagged as a project, with tag colors used to visually separate projects from other to-dos. A “water plants once a week” item is converted into a repeating habit using an “every 7 days” command (with repetition occurring 7 days after completion), then moved into a “chores” note and tagged as “habits,” colored differently.

If the inbox is empty, the review phase is complete. The final step—planning—happens in calendar mode. Users customize the calendar to show the tags they created (habits and projects), then drag and drop tasks onto the schedule, adjusting durations as needed. Habit tasks appear in a distinct color based on tag settings, making responsibilities easier to distinguish at a glance. After a week of iterating through this loop, the system evolves into a personalized set of notes, tags, and categories built from real usage rather than imported assumptions.