I was making half the minimum wage during my high school physics class.

For 15 minutes, I would take practice SAT questions to earn a two dollar Apple gift card (comes out to around $8/hour).

When the thought of buying GoodNotes entered my mind, I felt like an idiot: for an hour of work, I was wasting my money on an app with hundreds of free alternatives.

On November 4, 2021, I finally made the jump. Over the past 13ish months, GoodNotes has become a core part of my iPad workflow. Here’s how I use the 2022 iPad App Of The Year every single day:

About GoodNotes

First, let’s talk about the app itself (feel free to skip this section if you’re already familiar with GoodNotes).

GoodNotes is one of the most popular apps available for iPads. At the moment, it’s

ranked #1 in productivity apps and has a 4.8/5 rating from over 206,000 reviews.

The app is technically free, but it costs $8.99 to unlock the full version. I’ve never used the free version (I bought GoodNotes when it didn’t have the option), but I’m 99% sure the paid version is worth the cost for the vast majority of users.

How I Use It

Along with Notion, GoodNotes is one of the few apps you can always find on my iPad (if you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that I constantly cycle through apps).

I use GoodNotes for creative tasks where I can use the Apple Pencil, like note-taking or brainstorming ideas. That’s where GoodNotes shines for me: it transforms the iPad and the Apple Pencil into a beacon of creativity.

Whenever I open GoodNotes, I feel driven to create something. Here are four ways I harness this creative force:

Notes

As a student, notes are pretty important.

The best example of note-taking I have would be for my microeconomics class. As a year-long course crammed into a semester-long time frame, this course is lecture-heavy. That makes my notes especially important.

Here’s an example of my econ notes:

For any students out there, my note-taking style is pretty simple: if the class is memorization heavy, I use bullet points or even directly take notes on flashcards. If the class is concept heavy, I like using arrows to connect different ideas (this helps solidify my understanding).

I’ve tried exploring different ideas before, but I always come back to these two simple strategies.

PDFs

This is where GoodNotes really surprised me.

GoodNotes is actually a pretty decent PDF app, though I assume that wasn’t an intended use case.

As a student, I don’t have to do any ultra-powerful task with my PDFs: at most, I need an app that can annotate PDFS, re-arrange pages, and combine multiple files. GoodNotes can pretty easily do all three of these.

Journaling

GoodNotes is also pretty decent for journaling. While it probably isn’t as great as other apps (keeping in mind that its intended purpose was for note-taking), it’ll do the job for most people.

I personally use Notion, but I’ve tested out GoodNotes from time-to-time and it’s definitely a solid option. I’ve even been considering a switch to GoodNotes because it would force me to sit down and focus every time I add a journal entry (at the moment, I’ve developed an admittedly bad habit of journaling while half-awake in my bed).

Brainstorming

As a tool for brainstorming, GoodNotes is fantastic — while any note-taking app is usually good at this, there are a few features of GoodNotes that make it slightly better than the others:

• The new Quick Note feature

• The infinite templates available

• Availability of Split View and Stage Manager with multiple GoodNotes windows

I enjoy using GoodNotes to brainstorm ideas for everything, like this blog, my favorite sports teams, debate speeches, etc.

Final Thoughts

“I absolutely love this app. I use this more for pdf creation and personal journaling than anything else” — App Store Reviewer

Thanks for reading!

Adi

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