Bullet Journaling Guide: What Is It, How To Do It and More
What is Bullet Journaling?
Bullet journaling is a popular organization method that combines elements of a planner, journal, and to-do list. It was created by Ryder Carroll, a digital product designer, in an effort to streamline his own note-taking and task management process. The idea is to create a flexible system that can be personalized to suit an individual's specific needs and goals.
A Look Back at Notejoy's Third Year
The end of 2020 marks the third anniversary since Notejoy's launch. Despite a challenging year, the Notejoy team is celebrating one of its most productive years yet. We released 57 major releases this past year, giving us a cadence of over one release per week. I wanted to highlight the 10 most important releases from the past year in case you missed any of them.
Offline access
Notejoy added offline access to its web and desktop apps, making it effortless to browse all of your notes while offline, continue to edit notes and add new ones, and to seamlessly sync it all whenever you come back online. Notejoy's offline support also makes your overall Notejoy experience much faster by first loading notes from your local device before also checking Notejoy's servers for any changes.
Nested notebooks
We added support for nested notebooks, significantly enhancing your ability to organize your notes. There is no limit to how deep your nested notebook hierarchy can be, allowing you to find the right organization to fit your unique needs.
Nested tags
We similarly added support for nested tags, allowing you to easily build a hierarchy of tags to organize your notes with equally no limit on the depth of your nested tags. With nested tags and nested notebooks, Notejoy now provides one of the most robust solutions for organizing your notes exactly the way you'd like.
Send note via email
In addition to our robust collaboration functionality, we wanted to add a light-weight way to share notes with non-users of Notejoy. So you can now email the full contents of a note to anyone, maintaining all of your styles and including images & attachments.
Revamped iOS and Android apps
We released revamped versions of our iOS and Android apps, with a ton of new functionality, including: dark mode, take a photo directly from your camera, syntax highlighting, 2FA, Sign in with Apple, tons of performance enhancements, and bug fixes.
Import from Apple Notes, Microsoft OneNote, and Markdown
We built a robust set of importers to allow you to quickly migrate your notes from Apple Notes, Microsoft OneNote, and from markdown files. We are just weeks away from launching our Evernote importer as well.
Search operators
We added a robust set of search operators to give you powerful ways to refine your query, including searching comments, finding attachments, phrase match, wildcard search, and so much more.
Keyboard shortcuts & markdown for remaining styles
For our productivity minded users, we enhanced our existing keyboard shortcuts and markdown syntax to include all possible styles.
Redesigned word count
We redesigned word count to always be visible as you type so you can view live results as you continue to edit your work.
New logo
And finally, we released a new logo for Notejoy! We hope this brighter, cleaner, and simpler logo better reflects the intuitive, light-weight, and fast experience we aspire to always deliver in Notejoy. We also decided it was time to retire the physical notebook metaphor of the past and instead lean into being a digitally native canvas for all of your ideas.
Thank you to all of our users for continually giving us feedback and pushing us to make Notejoy the most intuitive yet powerful notes platform out there. We can't wait to show you what we have in store for 2021 :)
Sachin Rekhi
Founder & CEO, Notejoy
Meeting Minutes Templates and Examples
Whether for business, club, or sports events, meeting minutes can be a key part of keeping the entire team up-to-date on what happened. And it doesn't have to be an arduous task.
Below are some example templates as well as tips and ideas to help you get started with writing and preparing effective meeting minutes.
Effective Meeting Agendas with Examples
When meetings veer off-track, participants arrive unprepared, and topics are irrelevant — these problems often arise due to poor agenda design.
Agendas are important because an effective one increases team productivity
An effective agenda increases the productivity of the overall meeting because it establishes expectations on what needs to occur before, during, and after a meeting. It helps get everyone on the same page on the most important topics and enables the team to quickly address key issues.
Using Notejoy for Stand Up Meetings
Many teams find Notejoy to be an invaluable tool for running their daily stand up meetings due to its real-time collaboration features and quick ease of use.
Notes for Stand Up Meetings
Whether you call it your daily stand up, daily scrum, or team huddle, stand up meetings are an invaluable way for small teams to stay in sync and accountable to one another.
A Look Back at Notejoy's Second Year
I can't believe it's now been two years since we launched Notejoy. And what a productive year it has been! We launched over 48 major releases this year, giving us a cadence of almost one major release per week. I wanted to take a moment to recap the 10 most important releases in case you might have missed any of them.
Organizing Your Work Through Tags
Whether you're working by yourself or working with a team, tags are an often overlooked way to super charge your productivity and stay organized.
How to Embrace Project Management for Agencies
Not having a solid project management plan in place can make or break the success of your agency. The lack can result in time wasted in endless meetings, project delays, and unhappy clients who don't refer the new business that helps you grow. If you can get solid project management in place, it pays off in spades with happy clients, happy employees, and positive growth.
How to Respond to a Request for Proposal (RFP)
So you've been tasked with responding to a request for proposal, or an RFP. How do you respond? This guide can help by diving into the specifics of what an RFP actually is, why you might need one, and how to get started with making one today.
To start, let's define it.
Tips for Setting Up an Agency Client Portal
Agencies will often set up client portals to provide their client with access to documents, deliverables, and other resources for the projects they're working on together. Rather than pushing all the materials through email, the client portal is a website that both the agency and client can login to directly to access these materials. This is particularly useful if there are documents that need to be regularly updated, sensitive materials, or large files. By having one location that is a shared resource, you can streamline communications and make sure that everyone is looking at the same resources together.
How to Create an Agency Business Plan
Whether you're revisiting your existing business or just getting started, an agency business plan can be a vital document that helps focus and prioritize your work against your goals. It's often helpful to think about this as a living document rather than a static one; instead of creating one masterpiece in an afternoon or week of thinking, think of your business plan as a starting point based on the information that you have today. When the situation changes, you can always revisit and revise.
Maximizing Your Productivity with Notejoy
Whether you're using Notejoy for your own productivity or together with a team, it is an easy and powerful tool for capturing ideas, sharing it with others, and keeping the information you need searchable and easy to find. Make the most out of the tool by taking advantage of some of its key productivity features. Here are 7 of our highlights for maximizing your productivity with Notejoy.
How to Collaborate With Notejoy
From internal teams to clients to friends, Notejoy helps your team collaborate and share their best ideas and information. Notejoy was designed for collaboration from the start, with many features and workflows to enable discussion and productivity without ever leaving the app. Work in Notejoy happens in real-time, with edits, comments, reactions and more synced in real-time as your team works in the app.
A Look Back at Notejoy's First Year
Today we're excited to celebrate the one year anniversary of launching Notejoy! We can't believe a whole year has already flown by. But what a productive year it's been. We've launched over 60 major releases this year. So we thought we'd take a moment to recap the 15 most important releases in case you missed any of them.
8 Gift Ideas for Organized People
As the holiday season approaches, it can be a real challenge to find the right Christmas gift or holiday gift for that highly organized and productive person who has it all. After all, if they're organized, it follows that they've put a lot of thought into how to structure their day.
Best Trello Alternatives for Productive Teams
When it comes to lightweight project management software, Trello is one of the most popular apps used by millions worldwide. However, Trello isn't the perfect tool for everyone so if you're looking for alternatives then you've arrived at the right place.
Apps like Evernote
Finding an app like Evernote can be a real challenge depending on your situation. If you're just in search of a productive life and trying out different tools, then there's a host of note-taking apps out there that claim to be great Evernote alternatives. However, if you're in search of specific features that Evernote doesn't quite surface for you, it's a different challenge.
Getting Started with the Notejoy Power-Up for Trello
Introduction
If you're interested in learning how to use Notejoy with Trello and want a quick overview of what it's all about, then this getting started guide is for you. We'll introduce you to the basics of how to get started with the Notejoy Power-Up for Trello, and show you how to get the most out of it.
Notejoy vs. Evernote
Why settle for Evernote? Notejoy provides modern, collaborative notes for individuals and teams
Notejoy is built for collaboration
13 Ways to Use Notejoy
Notejoy is an easy and powerful collaboration tool that can be used to capture & share just about anything with your team. But what makes Notejoy shine is that it's far easier to capture and share notes compared to traditional tools, resulting in teams sharing well beyond what they traditionally shared in docs & wikis.
Here are thirteen such ways teams today are using Notejoy to capture & share more with their team.
Agenda & Template For Successful One-On-One Meetings
The one-on-one meeting is one of the most important tools managers have with their teams. It's a dedicated, recurring time to discuss issues, develop a strong relationship, and ensure goals are on track to being met. According to Elizabeth Grace Saunders, the author of How to Invest Your Time Like Money, “One-on-ones are one of the most important productivity tools you have as a manager. They are where you can ask strategic questions such as, are we focused on the right things? And from a rapport point of view, they are how you show employees that you value them and care about them.”
Asking the Right User Research Questions (Template and Examples Included!)
Interviewing users is an art — whether you are running usability testing, focus groups, ethnographic research or whatnot. When you undertake an interview process, you'll want to invest time up front for planning it out. Often user research projects are days if not weeks of preparation, conversations, and capturing and processing information. To ensure that all this effort is put to good use, take the time to properly plan out your questions.
How to use an Interview Feedback Template to Ensure Great Candidate Experience
The reality many teams face when trying to hire candidates is that multiple interviewers have to say yes. The modern office is collaborative by nature; in order to be effective in their role, a new hire has to be able to navigate and work across across many groups and functions. Therefore, the more people you get together to assess a candidate the better.
However, the overall interview process can feel very costly. Why? Candidates often need to meet and interview across multiple teams, with differing perspectives and opinions. Reaching consensus can be difficult. Juggling calendars can be even worse. And then afterward, collecting feedback on what people thought can be an exercise in herding cats. However, the benefit is that you get an unbiased and well-rounded view of how the candidate will fit into the group as a whole.
How to Create a Successful New Hire Orientation
When you welcome a new employee into your company, new hire orientation is often an important component to ensuring that they get off to a strong start in their new role within your organization. The goal of new employee orientation is to welcome the new employee, get them integrated into the organization, and have them performing their new job successfully as quickly as possible. New hire orientation and onboarding work best when it's a comprehensive, systematic process of integrating new employees into the organization.
The components of a new hire orientation
Three Meeting Minutes Samples
Meeting minutes are a critical and often overlooked element in making sure that meetings result in successful outcomes. Used well, meeting minutes are not only the record of what happened in the meeting, but also a crucial communication tool to let the attendees and the rest of the team know what happened and expected action items after a meeting took place. In the case of more formal board meetings, meeting minutes are often also a legal record of what took place which means that good accurate notes are even more important.
Three Meeting Minutes Samples
How to Create a Policy and Procedures Manual
Organizations create policies and procedures manual to house their best practices, core business processes, and policy documents. A well-written manual can improve your company by establishing clarity on guidelines, goals, and organizational knowledge, while enabling the team to focus on the company's growth and scale.
Creating a Policy and Procedures Manual
To get started with creating a manual, here are some of the key considerations.
Five Samples of Employee Handbooks
Pulling together an employee handbook can be a daunting task. But it's also an important one. An employee handbook is a vital resource that communicates the employer's history, values, policies, procedures, and benefits in a written format. It's also an important way to protect both the employee and employer by establishing clear workplace expectations from the beginning.
In the process of putting together a great employee handbook, it can be helpful to look at samples of how other companies have expressed their brand story through their employee handbooks.
Employee Handbook Samples
Four Free Employee Handbook Templates
An employee handbook is a vital resource that communicates the employer's history, values, policies, procedures, and benefits in a written format. It's also an important way to protect both the employee and employer by establishing clear workplace expectations from the beginning.
If you're interested in how to put together a great employee handbook, see our guide here.
Free Employee Handbook Templates
How to Put Together a Great Employee Handbook
What is an employee handbook?
An employee handbook is a valuable resource for both the employer and employee, detailing the rights of the employee as well as the legal obligations of the employer. Often it covers the organization's history, values, policies, procedures, and benefits in a written format. It's a way to protect both the employee and the employer by establishing clear expectations which prevents legal disputes between two parties.
How to Take Meeting Minutes
Meeting minutes are the notes that serve as the official record of what happened at a meeting. It's important not only as the record to look back at what happened, but also as a communication tool to help those present stay up to date. Good meeting minutes will communicate not only what was decided but also what they need to achieve by when. The person in charge of taking minutes is responsible for preparing for the meeting, accurately documenting what happened, and distributing the notes afterward.
New Hire Checklist Template
After you close your new hire on their new job, you'll need to successfully onboard and set them up within your company. Companies often create new hire checklists as a way to help managers and HR ensure they're covering all the necessary steps to welcome a new member to the team.
What goes into an HR new hire checklist?
How to Improve Meeting Notes with Notejoy Templates
It's rare that you find the team that regularly takes meeting notes and documents next steps or action items. In addition to this, even more commonly meeting notes are taken but not shared or accessible to others who want to get an update.
Notejoy can help teams with managing their team's shared knowledge in meeting notes. Creating a standard template and sharing notes in Notejoy is not only a great way to encourage your team to organize your notes, but also a way to keep everyone on the same page.
Here's how to do it.
Managing Your Projects with the Design Brief
When effectively written, a design brief (also known as a creative brief) will not only allow you to identify and address roadblocks early, but also speed up your development process.
Four keys to managing your design brief process
Creative Brief Template
Creative briefs are an essential communication tool for ensuring that a project is well-understood and all parties are aligned on objectives and requirements. By investing the time to write a clear brief up-front, you can pitfalls of unnecessary rework and cycles of back and forth in accomplishing a project.
Content and Editorial Calendar Templates
When you’re building and executing a content marketing plan, a content calendar (also known as an editorial calendar) is a cornerstone to success, ensuring that your roadmap is aligned to your business goals. A well-planned content calendar allows you to plan out content for the upcoming weeks, months, and even year in order to execute against your content strategy. According to Curata research, 90 percent of marketers now use a content calendar which is a lot!
5 Meeting Agenda Templates
Effective agendas increase the productivity of meetings because they establish what needs to occur before, during, and after a meeting. It helps everyone get on the same page on what needs to be done, and done right enables teams to quickly address key issues.
Depending on the meeting’s purpose and the needs of your business, agendas can be simple or complex, tightly scripted or casual. What follows are five different examples, formal to informal, of agendas that enable teams to move fast and execute effectively.
Real Business Examples of SMART Goals
Part of the regular operations of businesses is setting business objectives and goals that translate into results. However, goals are less effective if they are poorly written and vague. So how do you actually put goals into practice?
SMART Goals Templates for Work
The Smart Goal setting framework is a great way to bring structure and trackability for managing progress against your objectives. The acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based. In order to be a SMART goal, the goal needs to meet all five of these criteria. If you'd like to learn more, here's an in-depth explanation of Smart Goals including examples.
SMART Goals Examples for Work
20+ Examples of Work Goals That Follow the SMART Criteria
The SMART in Smart Goals stands for stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based. In order to be a SMART goal, the goal needs to meet all five of these criteria. For a more detailed run-down on what each of these means check out our Guide to Smart Goals.
Using Notejoy for SMART Goals
The Smart Goal setting framework is a great way to bring structure and trackability for managing progress against your objectives. The acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based. In order to be a SMART goal, the goal needs to meet all five of these criteria. If you'd like to learn more, here's an in-depth explanation of Smart Goals including examples.
What are SMART Goals?
Whether you're leveraging them for work or personal life, SMART goal setting brings structure and trackability into establishing and managing your progress to your objectives. Many teams also find SMART goals to be effective not only as a way to work toward objectives, but also to communicate and prioritize their shared work together.
Getting Started with Notejoy
Introduction
If you're new to Notejoy and want a quick overview of what it's all about, then this getting started guide is for you. We introduce the core concepts of Notejoy and get you on your way to getting the most out of the product.
8 New Years Resolution Ideas for 2018
New year, new leaf. As the new year begins, it's a time for reflection on the lessons from the past year. And also a time for us to start new with resolutions for the new year. But how to make them count?
Here are 8 ideas for resolutions and strategies to make them actionable.