The Note App Graveyard on Your Phone Has Fifty Corpses
Evernote, Google Keep, Notion, OneNote, Bear, Simplenote, Obsidian. You've tried them. You migrated between three of them. Your notes are scattered across platforms like shrapnel, and half the connections between ideas exist only in your head — where they're quietly decaying.
The problem isn't the apps. It's that unstructured note-taking gives you zero forced architecture. You dump text into a void and pray that search finds it later.
Five Boxes Force You to Think Before You Write
This template doesn't give you one infinite text field. It gives you five discrete Note Boxes, and that constraint is the entire design philosophy. Box 01 might hold the core idea. Box 02 has the hint text pre-built with a list-formatting convention using dashes and headers — it's practically begging you to structure your supporting points. Boxes 03 through 05 are for context, counterarguments, follow-up actions, whatever secondary material belongs near the note but not inside it.
The hint text in Box 02 is worth reading carefully. It provides a template-within-a-template: headers separated by dashes, sub-items with > prefixes, list items with - marks. It's a plaintext outlining system that works on any screen size without a Markdown renderer.
Voice Notes Between the Text
Audio fields sit between Note Boxes 03/04 and 04/05. Not at the bottom. Not in a separate section. In the flow of the notes themselves. When you're capturing an idea while driving or walking, you record into Voice Note 01 and fill in the surrounding text boxes later. The audio becomes context, not an orphan file in a recording app you'll never revisit.
Cross-References That Actually Work
Three Related Entry fields link to other records in the same Memento library. This is the feature that separates a note database from a note app. When you create an entry about a machine learning concept and link it to entries about the dataset you're using and the paper you read, you've built a local knowledge graph without needing a graph database.
Two Related Links and three Hyperlinks handle external references. The separation is intentional — Related Links are contextual sources, Hyperlinks under Header 01 are actionable destinations. A Related Link might point to the Wikipedia article you referenced. A Hyperlink points to the GitHub repo you need to clone.
The Image field and Author/Created metadata round out the record. Every note has provenance — who wrote it and when — which matters the moment you share a Memento library with a collaborator and need to know whose half-formed thought you're reading at 11 PM.