You have installed something new. There is an empty sidebar, a blank note, and a settings panel with a lot in it.
The temptation is enormous and it is always the same: spend the afternoon setting it up properly. Build the folder structure. Decide the tag taxonomy. Make templates for everything. Import the old notes. Choose a theme, then a different theme.
That afternoon is the single most reliable predictor of abandoning the app by March, and the reason is not obvious.
Why the setup weekend kills it
You are designing for a collection that does not exist. Every structural decision made on day one is a guess about material you have not written yet. The guesses are usually wrong, and wrong structure is worse than none — it makes every subsequent capture a filing decision, and filing decisions are where systems die.
It front-loads all the pleasure. Setting up is genuinely enjoyable, and it produces the feeling of having done something. That feeling is spent before you have written anything, and what remains is the ordinary, unremarkable business of using the thing.
It creates sunk cost, which distorts judgement. Having spent six hours, you will persist with an arrangement that is not working, and then quit all at once rather than adjusting.
Importing everything makes it stale on day one. You now have a new app that already feels like the cluttered one you left. The archive can stay where it is; the working set is what needs to move, and it is a few hundred notes at most.
The ten-minute setup
Genuinely all of it.
Turn on the two things that affect comfort. Text size and theme, if the defaults are wrong for you. Two minutes, and it is the only settings work that pays back immediately because you will be looking at it for hours.
Learn one shortcut: new note. Not four. One. The others come later, one a week.
Make no folders and no tags. None. You do not yet know what the categories are, and search will cover you until you do.
Write one real note. Not a test note — an actual thing you needed to write down today. The first note being real rather than "Hello" matters more than it sounds; it makes the app a place where your work is rather than a thing you are evaluating.
Stop. That is the setup.
The first week
Use it for capture only, and refuse to organise.
Every time something needs writing down, write it. No folder, no tag, no decision about where. Let it pile up flat. This feels wrong to organised people and it is the whole point — you are collecting evidence about what you actually write, which is the only sound basis for any structure.
Notice two things while you do it:
What you write most. Almost everyone is surprised. People who thought they needed a project hierarchy discover that 80% of their notes are daily scratch. People who planned for daily notes find they mostly write reference material.
Where the friction is. The moment you thought "I should write this down" and did not. That specific friction is the thing worth fixing, and it is usually not what you expected — it is rarely a missing feature, and usually the app not being open, or capture requiring a decision.
Week two: add exactly one thing
Whatever the past week actually demanded. One.
If you kept losing things in the flat pile, add the minimum structure that fixes the specific loss — probably three or four groupings, not eleven. If you kept writing the same shape of note, make one template. If capture friction was the issue, fix that and nothing else.
One change, then another week of use. This is slower than a setup weekend and it produces a structure that fits, because every element of it was added in response to an actual failure rather than an imagined one.
The rule to hold for the first month: never add structure in anticipation. Only in response.
What to migrate, and when
Not in week one. Around week three, once you know the app is going to stick.
The last six months, and the notes you actually reference. Usually a few hundred at most, and often far fewer.
Not the archive. Leave it in the old app, or export it to a folder on disk where Spotlight will index it. It is still searchable; it just is not in the way. This is the single biggest difference between a new system that feels clean and one that feels like the old one with a new logo.
Take a full export of the old app regardless, whether or not you migrate. It costs an hour and it means the decision stays reversible, which is true of every move between apps.
The three-month test
The honest evaluation point. Not week two, when everything is new and you are enthusiastic; not week six, when the novelty has gone and everything feels slightly worse than it is.
At three months, ask:
Is everything in one place, or have second locations appeared? Second locations are the diagnostic. If things are also landing in phone notes, text files and messages to yourself, the app is failing at capture — and that will not be fixed by another app unless you can say specifically why.
Do you search, or do you browse? Searching means you trust that things are in there. Browsing usually means you do not.
Would you be annoyed to lose it? If yes, it has become your system. If not, three months of use has told you something.
The honest version
Everything above is really one instruction: use it before you design it. The structure that survives is discovered, not planned, and every hour spent planning is an hour spent guessing about material that does not exist.
If you have abandoned several apps, this is the change most likely to break the pattern — more than the choice of app itself, which is usually not what went wrong.
Cyanote is built to make the ten-minute version viable. There is nothing you have to set up: ⌘N for a new note, ⇧⌘D for today's, / inside the editor for any block type, and ⇧⌘F to search everything you have written, which is what lets you go without folders for as long as you like. Notes nest into sub-pages when you eventually want structure, and [[ links things without filing them. It opens in under a second from one local database on your own Mac — which matters most in exactly the first week, when the habit is either forming or not.