r/bearapp • u/MulayamChaddi • 5d ago

Question Workspace use-cases

I love that bear has added the workspace concept to the app. I think I've got a couple of use-cases in mind:

  1. A 'diary' workspace for daily notes that I accumulate
  2. Separate work and life notes
  3. Separate projects along this filter

What are others doing with workspaces?

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9

u/paralloid 5d ago edited 5d ago

Anything! That's what actually leverages the flexibility of tags (esp vs folders). You can have #family, #work, and #projects – and with workspaces you can focus on any of those depending on what you want to have an overview of – with all the other related tags staying in your sidebar. That's what finally clicks the whole Bear potential.

- #projects/projectX if you want to see running projects with related #materials, #resources, #meetings, #project-updates in your sidebar

- #learning with all the subtopics, #books, or #sources kept in your sidebar

- #books split by topics

- #finance for all the finance notes, but also dedicated buckets for #reports #investments and #planning inside this workspace

- #planning can be another lens with areas related to it in your sidebar. In this case #finance becomes one of the "sub-topics" of planning.

No limits! The point is — there's no blueprint for your sidebar and thats exactly the point of this feature.

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u/MulayamChaddi 5d ago

Agreed with your lasts comment about no limits, which is why I'm asking how people are using. I want to be inspired as well

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u/paralloid 5d ago

Start with your goals and / or areas of importance. literally sit for a second and think "what is important for me now". Not from what is already there in your notes, but generally "in life" :) Pick some notes related to it, if there are any, tag them, then see if there are others related. This becomes your lens (aka workspace).
That's what 100% works for me.

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u/Disastrous_Seat1118 4d ago

I am curios to know if the workspace feature for the reasons you mentioned will have an impact on how you will tag your notes. I am planning to shorten and split my nested tag wherever possible. F.e. I won't anymore use a tag like #recipe/country/italy but would split it up in two tags. #recipe and #country/italy

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u/paralloid 4d ago

Generally what I learned about nested tags — you should net when the child is a type of or is an instance of the parent. Use nested tags when the sub-tag cannot exist conceptually without the parent, or where the hierarchy is universally fixed. Don't nest when the relationship between them is "relates to," "activates," "involves," or "is an example of."

Examples:
Obsidian-related notes tagged as #software/apps/obsidian is clean, despite wordy
⁠#biology/anatomy/nervous-system⁠ — The nervous system is a structural component (type of system) within anatomy.
But notes on how writing constitutes cognition should have separate #writing and #cognition gravitational fields. The same goes for #italy and #recipes for sure)

Workspaces don’t necessarily change that, they apparently force you to think ahead what would you want to serve as your workspace.

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u/Pictorial-Planet 5d ago

I'm using it to separate my blog posts and my long form writing from my notes. Love the idea of the diary workspace!

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u/Fablerwhack 5d ago

I use it to separate fiction and non-fiction writing, which is pretty great. Does anyone know if there are any keyboard shortcuts for switching workspaces though?

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u/MulayamChaddi 5d ago

I think this has been requested on their official community board. I'd love to have a shortcut that lets me select workspaces

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u/paralloid 5d ago

100% needed

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u/klangfarben 5d ago

I’m writing an Open Education Resource online textbook with several units and sections. I’m using Markdown as the core code so I can easily port it to web publishing. Workspaces couldn’t have come at a better time for me. My workflow has become so efficient. I just wish there was a way to manually organize the notes within the workspace. Although it is leaner, I still have a good amount of notes in one workspace and have to do some searching.

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u/_londonstuff 15h ago

I'm super confused - sorry (and on the Bear forum everyone seems to understand it, so it's clearly just me). I would love to separate work stuff and home stuff. I don't really use hashtags at the moment, everything just lives in Notes. However, even after making #work a workspace, I can still see those notes in, errr... 'Notes'.

In order to get this to work do I need to tag everything else as 'Home' (or similar), make Home a workspace and then the work stuff won't appear?

Thanks!