Nestful’s Substack
Nestful is very list-centric. Even the Kanban and Agenda views are just horizontal lists of vertical lists, and Nestful’s free-form text, the description field, is very limited. This avoidance in on purspose, a result of trial and error.
Before building Nestful, I had used some note-based competitors only to realize they weren’t competitors at all. Note-taking is a form of knowledge organization that is almost entirely orthogonal to list-taking.
When I tried using note-taking solutions exclusively, I found myself trying to recreate the functionality of list-taking inside of a note. While it is technically possible, it breaks down fairly early.
An essay such as this blog post is the immediate example, where each paragraph is part of the essay and although it has some meaning by itself, it is significantly reduced.
Job listings, reviews, pitch documents, diary entries, and summaries are more examples that fit note-taking well. They consist of sections that form a whole, with each section losing significance when in isolation .
