A daily scratchpad note for a calmer workday

A daily scratchpad note is one page per day where everything loose goes: the few things that matter today, scraps of text, what you are waiting on, and what got done. Start it in the morning, keep it close while you work, and close it in the evening by moving what is left. You can run one in Apple Notes with a pinned note per day, or in Inkling, which has a daily scratchpad template and opens from the notch.

Why a page per day helps

Most of the strain in a workday is not the work. It is the loose ends held in your head: a number someone read out, a reply you owe, the thing you meant to check after lunch. Each one is easy. Holding a dozen at once is tiring, and the worry about dropping one is worse.

Any scratchpad takes them out of your head. A daily one adds two things a single endless page does not have:

• It has edges. The page starts this morning and ends tonight. When the day is over you can read it top to bottom and see whether anything is left.
• Yesterday stays put. Last Tuesday’s page is still there if you need to find what someone said, but it does not crowd today.

Those edges are what make the day feel calmer. You are not facing everything you have ever written down, only today’s page.

What to put on the page

Keep the layout the same every day so you never have to think about it. Five short sections cover most work:

• Today. Three things, at most, that would make the day a good one. Use checkboxes.
• Scratch. Anything at all: phone numbers, half sentences, a command you will run twice, a link. No order.
• Waiting on. Who owes you what, and since when.
• Done. A running list of what you finished, including things that were never on any list.
• Tomorrow. What to carry over, written at the end of the day.

Done is the section people skip, and the one that helps most. On a day full of interruptions, a list of finished things is proof the day went somewhere, and it answers “what did you do yesterday” in seconds.

Setting it up in Apple Notes

Apple Notes works well for this with a simple routine.

1. Make a folder called Daily with File, then New Folder.
2. Each morning, make a new note in that folder and type the date on the first line. The first line becomes the note’s title, so each day’s note is easy to pick out in the list.
3. Add the five section names underneath, and turn the Today lines into a checklist with Format, then Checklist.
4. Pin the note so it stays at the top: Control-click it in the notes list and choose Pin Note.
5. At the end of the day, unpin it. Tomorrow’s note takes its place.

If typing the section names each morning gets old, the Shortcuts app can build a shortcut that creates a note with the date and your sections already filled in, and you can give that shortcut a keyboard shortcut of its own.

The catch is getting back to the page. Notes has to be brought to the front each time you add a line, which is a few more steps than a scratchpad wants, and those steps are where loose ends go unwritten.

Close the day so tomorrow starts clean

The end-of-day pass is what turns a scratch page into a calmer workday. It takes a few minutes:

1. Tick what is done, and add anything finished that was never written down.
2. Move what has a home. A date goes into Calendar, a phone number into Contacts, a project detail into the project’s own note.
3. Decide on each unfinished item. Carry it to Tomorrow, or delete it. An item carried day after day probably needs a different plan, not another day.
4. Write one line on where you stopped. “Halfway through the budget, start at the travel section.” It is the fastest way back in the next morning.
5. Close the page.

In the morning, start a new page and copy the Tomorrow items into Today. Pick your three before you open email, while the choice is still yours.

A daily scratchpad in the notch

Inkling ships with a daily scratchpad template, alongside meeting, project and journal templates. Start the day’s note from it, add the sections you use, and save the result as your own template, so every morning begins with the same layout. Pin today’s note so it is always easy to find.

Getting to the page is where the notch helps. Hover over the notch or press Option-N from any app, and the note drops down over your work. Add a line, press Command-Return, and it tucks away while Ink, the pair of eyes in the notch, gives a nod. One key in, one key out, so the scraps actually get written down.

The rest of the routine maps onto things the app already does:

• Checkboxes for Today, and a highlight on the one item that is blocked.
• Tags for threads that run across days, such as everything you are waiting on, so you can follow the tag instead of reading old pages.
• Links between notes, so a scratch line can point to the project note it belongs to.
• Search for a phrase across every past day, when you need what someone said last week.
• Previous versions of a note, if the end-of-day tidy removes something you needed.

If you want the notch itself to be calm, Ink’s mood can be set to Lively, Calm or Still. There are two themes, Night and Paper, with five accent colors.

Limits worth knowing

Notes are stored on the Mac, and writing and searching work offline. iCloud sync to your other Macs is optional and off by default, through your own private iCloud. There is no iPhone or iPad app, so if your daily page needs to come with you on your phone, Apple Notes is the better home for it. There is no sharing either; the scratchpad is yours alone, which suits what it is for.

Old daily pages can be exported as Markdown, rich text or PDF, and daily local backups are kept on the Mac. Inkling costs $12 once after 24 hours free, with no card needed, on macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

Questions

One note per day, or one running note? One per day if you want edges and an easy end-of-day check. A running note is fine until it gets long enough that you scroll more than you read; that is the point to switch.

What should I do with old daily pages? Leave them. They take up almost no space, and search finds what is in them. If a page holds something you will need often, move that part into a note of its own.

What if a day goes nothing like the page? Write what happened in Done anyway. The page is a record as much as a plan, and a day that went sideways is still worth seeing clearly the next morning.