Abandoned Notes are a Tools Problem

Updated February 2, 2026

Over the past years I have used many note-taking apps, but I could never really stick to a single one. This was a combination of an important feature that I wanted but were missing or implemented poorly (canvas) and a feeling that something was wrong--a feeling that I was chafing against some invisible wall while using the app.

I wanted to stick to one app to take notes because I considered it an important part of my long-tem growth, but I couldn't not only because of the very visible hole left by the missing features but that same inexplicable bad feeling. It wasn't outright pain, but just enough of a sting to make me flinch and keep me away. This would lead me to eventually abandon the notes I took altogether.

It was hard to pinpoint because it largely stems from a concept that is kind of ubiquitous and which didn't think much of: files. I built HelloMond to solve this problem once and for all, for myself and for others who may have experienced a similar problem without realizing it.

"Filing" is Friction

If you want to write down a book recommendation, where do you put it? Do you create a file or folder called Book Recommendations? Maybe it goes under Recipes because it'a actually a recipe book. Or maybe it goes under Miscellaneous because that's where this sort of one-off notes go.

This need to place or "file" an idea before you write it down is just pure friction: energy uselessly lost to entropy. As much as you would like it, your notes don't fit neatly together into a hierarchy of folders. First, a note may logically belong in many places, but we generally don't think of files as existing in multiple places. Second, your thoughts, ideas, knowledge change over time! Even if you put things in the right place the first time, that may quickly become untrue. Your folder structure requires constant maintenance without which it will fall apart and stop being useful.

Files are the Wrong Tool for Making Connections

I think an important goal of taking notes either for school, work or for life, is to be able to connect ideas toegether. Steve Jobs says that creativity is just connecting ideas, and real cognitive science shows that being able to connect two (espeically disparate) things is a keystone of the creative process.

Connecting things across files is clunky at best and impossible at worst. You can add hyperlinks between whole files, but files can contain multiple ideas, and you cannot link to a specific part or section of a file. In this way, files feel like the "wrong" tool for the job, like having a box full of only 16x16 Lego plates to build with.

An Alternative Approach: Nodes and Links

Nodes are "things" and links are connections between nodes. In Wikipedia, you can consider the pages as nodes and the links to other Wikipedia pages as--well--the links. Links have a direction; for example, a link exists that goes from Willem_Dafoe to Appleton, Wisconsin. If there is a link that goes from A to B, we say A is a parent of B.

Instead of pages, in HelloMond each individual bullet point is a node. When you open a node in HelloMond, you are seeing its "children", the nodes that it directly connects to, and its "grandchildren" and so forth, in nested list form:

Links offer an alternative to folders for navigating your notes. Anything you can do with folders, you can do with links. For example, you can have a node titled Cooking that links to all your recipe nodes. Below is an example of linking a recipe using tags:

A powerful result of everything being nodes and links is that multiple nodes can link to the same node. For example, let's say you think of a launch recipe for your fledgling home brewery business and start writing it down in your daily journal. You can later link it to Launch recipes node (which is itself linked to Home brewery) , which allows you to view and edit the recipe from both Launch recipes and the daily journal entry.

Canvas Included

Some things are more easily drawn than written in words. There are times when I want to quickly put down a rough sketch or diagram.

HelloMond includes a canvas node type which is exactly that: a surface for quick sketches or diagrams. Like text nodes, they can be linked to and from other nodes. You can "embed" a canvas inside a text doc by linking from text node to a canvas, or vice versa embed a text doc inside a canvas by link from canvas to text.