What to Do With All the Stickies on Your Mac

Key takeaways

• Stickies is very good at one job: catching a thought in two seconds and keeping it in front of you. It was never built for the second job, which is deciding what the thought is about.
• Stickies stays on one Mac, and six colors are its whole filing system. When Apple's own guide explains how to see your notes on all your devices, it points you to the Notes app.
• Keep Stickies for capture. Once a week, move the stickies out, throw away the expired ones, and sort the rest by what they are about rather than by the color you happened to pick.
• Jotaid imports every sticky as its own note in the Inbox, turns its color into a tag, keeps its dates, and can be run again without making copies. It does not bring over pictures, and it does not update a sticky you already imported.

A desktop full of stickies

On a thread asking whether anyone still uses Stickies, one Mac user described his wife's screen: "My wife's desktop is covered with Stickies on top of top of Stickies, but she can find everything!" Another has kept a diary in Stickies for years. A third described his backup routine: "whenever I change one or add one, I export them all to Notes, then Print to PDF and Save to a folder on my Desktop. Then I copy the pdfs to a flash drive."

None of these people are confused about software. They picked the tool that was fastest to open and hardest to ignore, and it worked. The trouble shows up later, when there are forty stickies instead of four, some from last week and some from three years ago, and the only way to find one is to remember roughly where it sits on the screen.

This article is about that second moment: what to do with the stickies once you have them.

What Stickies gets right

It is worth being precise about why people stay, because a replacement that loses these qualities will not last.

• It is always there. You can set a note to stay in front of other windows (Window › Float on Top) or make it semi-transparent (Window › Translucent). A user on the MacRumors forums put the appeal in one line: "i'm an out of sight, out of mind person, so i'll just forget."
• It has no ceremony. There is no title field, no folder to choose, no save button. Apple's guide says your content "is saved automatically," and "the first line of the note is shown in the title bar when you collapse the note." The first line is the title, without you ever deciding on one.
• It is just enough formatting. A Hacker News commenter called Stickies their secret: "just enough WYSIWYG markup to capture an idea (before I immediately shuffle the idea somewhere else, e.g. emacs)."

Notice the end of that last quote. Before I immediately shuffle the idea somewhere else. The people who use Stickies best already treat it as a first stop, not a final one.

Where it stops

It lives on one Mac

Stickies has no iPhone app. When Apple's Stickies guide talks about seeing your notes "on all your Apple devices," it does so while describing how to move them into the Notes app. People have been asking for something else for a long time. In 2016 one Hacker News commenter wrote: "make an app that works exactly like Stickies.app, except shows up exactly the same on all of your devices. I'd pay about 20 bucks for that." A MacRumors thread asking for a way to sync Stickies to the iPhone runs for pages.

It isn't a document you saved

A sticky exists as long as it is open. Apple's guide is direct about it: "When Stickies is closed, notes don't appear on your desktop," and deleting a note is a button in its corner. One longtime user summed up the feeling: "you have to keep them on your desktop otherwise they're gone, you can't save them." (Stickies can export a single note as a text file, which is why the backup routine above exists at all.)

The storage underneath has also let people down. After the macOS Catalina update in late 2019, several MacRumors users reported their stickies vanishing. One of them traced it to a single index file that Stickies rewrites whenever a note changes: if the app quits mid-write, the index can end up empty, and every sticky disappears from the app even though each one's text is still on disk. Others in the thread recovered from Time Machine. Not everyone had a backup.

Six colors is the whole filing system

Stickies gives you a Color menu and a Find command. That is the full set of tools for organizing. Color works when it means something simple, like yellow for errands and pink for ideas. It stops working when a note is about two things, or when the question you want to ask is not "what did I mark pink?" but "what have I written about onboarding, ever?"

One user listed what lives in their stickies: Wi-Fi details, an Apple ID, bank logins, software product keys, airline account numbers, and the spark plug gap for a lawn mower. That list is the honest shape of a long-lived Stickies setup. Nothing is wrong with any single sticky. The collection has no structure, so all of it stays on the desktop, because the desktop is the only place you can see it.

Capture is only the first half

Every good note-taking method splits the work in two. First you catch the thought, quickly and without judging it. Later you decide what it is: whether to keep it, what it belongs with, and what it might become. Stickies is excellent at the first half and offers nothing for the second, which is why the second half ends up happening by copy and paste, or not at all.

A Hacker News commenter described the missing step exactly: "It should also be easy to remove a sticky by converting it permanently to a note or reminder." Whatever you use for that step, it should do six things:

1. Keep every sticky separate. Ten stickies should become ten notes, even when two of them start with the same word.
2. Keep when you wrote it. A note dated the day you happened to move it has lost information you cannot get back.
3. Keep the color as information, not as structure. Your color choices meant something. They should survive the move, but they should not decide where a note ends up.
4. Be safe to run again. You will keep using Stickies, so the move will happen more than once. The second run should bring over only what is new.
5. Leave Stickies alone. Moving notes out should never change or delete anything in Stickies itself.
6. Give you somewhere to sort. Moving forty stickies into forty notes in a list is only a different kind of pile.

Three ways out

Copy and paste. It works for five stickies. It does not keep dates, it does not keep colors, and for forty stickies it takes an evening.

Apple's Export All to Notes. This is built into Stickies (File › Export All to Notes). Apple's guide says your notes are "organized into separate folders for each color of note," and that they "also remain in Stickies." If what you want is your stickies on your iPhone and in one window, this does it for free, and it is a good choice. Notice what it does with color: it turns your six colors into six folders, so color is still the structure.

Import into Jotaid. On the Mac, press ⇧⌘I and choose Import Stickies. Jotaid opens the Stickies data folder for you, and one click brings every sticky into the Inbox. It was designed around the six requirements above:

• Each sticky becomes its own note, identified by the sticky itself rather than by its text, so two stickies that both start with "Ideas" stay two separate notes.
• The first line becomes the title, as it does in the Stickies title bar. If the first line is very long, the title is shortened and the full text stays in the body.
• The note is dated from the sticky's own files, not from the day you imported it.
• The color becomes a tag: stickies-yellow, stickies-pink, and so on. If Jotaid cannot tell which of the six colors a sticky uses, it leaves the tag off rather than guessing.
• Run it again next week and it brings over only the new stickies. It recognizes the ones it already imported, including ones you have since moved to the trash in Jotaid, so a sticky you deliberately deleted does not come back.
• It only reads from Stickies. Nothing there is changed.

Importing into the Inbox is free, and the Inbox syncs to Jotaid on your iPhone over iCloud.

A weekly pass, step by step

Here is the whole routine, worked through on an example. The eight stickies below are invented for illustration, but they are the kind of mix that piles up: two errands, a password, and five thoughts about work.

Color	First line
Yellow	Dentist: call before Friday
Yellow	Guest Wi-Fi password
Pink	New hires don't know who to ask
Pink	Buddy system for the first month?
Pink	Async writing instead of meetings for decisions?
Blue	Checklist book, chapter 3
Blue	Podcast: interview about async writing
Green	Onboarding doc is 40 pages and nobody reads it

1. Take the secrets out first

Before importing anything, look for passwords, product keys and account numbers. Move them into a password manager and delete those stickies. An imported note is a note: it is searchable and it syncs. That is what you want for an idea, and not what you want for a bank login. In the example, the Wi-Fi password goes to the password manager.

2. Import

Press ⇧⌘I, choose Import Stickies, and click Import in the panel that opens on the Stickies folder. The result tells you how many stickies came in, how many were already imported, how many were empty, and how many pictures were left behind. Jotaid switches to the Inbox so you can see them.

3. Triage

Go through the new notes once, quickly. For each one, decide only whether it is still alive. "Dentist: call before Friday" was useful on Tuesday and is dead now. Delete it. Don't sort yet; this pass is about cutting the pile down.

If you want to work through one color at a time, filter the Inbox by its tag, stickies-pink for example.

4. Sort by what each note is about

Switch to Card mode, where every note is a card you can drag. Look at the cards and ask what each one is about, then make a theme for each group that appears (⌘T) and drag the cards into it. A theme shows up on the board as a labeled border around its cards. You can also right-click a note and choose Move to Theme.

In the example, two groups appear: one about onboarding and one about async writing. Now look at where the cards came from:

The four onboarding notes came from three different colors. The color says what mood you were in when you caught the thought; the theme says what the thought is about.

The onboarding group pulls from pink, green and blue. Color recorded when and how you caught each thought: pink for a passing idea, green for a complaint, blue for something you read. None of that tells you that four of the eight were about the same problem. That only shows up when you sort by subject, and it is the step that Stickies, and a folder per color, never ask you to take.

The color tags stay on the notes, so nothing is lost. You can still ask for every pink note. It just stops being the only question you can ask.

5. Name the ideas that keep coming back

Inside a theme, some words turn out to carry the weight. In the example, "onboarding" shows up in notes from three colors, and the forty-page document is also about "checklists." In Jotaid you can mark a word like that as a concept by writing it in double brackets, [[onboarding]], or by selecting it and choosing Mark as Node. From then on, the concept has its own page listing every note that mentions it, including notes you write months from now. This is where a pile of stickies starts turning into something you can think with. How far to take it is a separate subject, covered in Stop Managing Notes. Start Developing Concepts.

If you have Pro, Smart Theme can propose the groups in step 4 for you to accept or reject, but the routine works the same without it.

6. Decide what stays in Stickies

After an import, the note in Jotaid is the one to edit. Re-importing will not pick up later changes to a sticky that was already imported; that is deliberate, so it never overwrites what you have since written in Jotaid. So either delete the stickies you moved, or leave them and stop editing them. Keep Stickies for whatever is new this week.

What the import does not do

• Pictures and attached files stay behind. Stickies lets you drag a picture or PDF into a note. Jotaid imports the text and tells you how many pictures it skipped. If a sticky's value is the picture, keep it in Stickies, or export that note on its own with File › Export Text as RTFD, which Apple says includes graphics.
• It does not sync back. Edits in Stickies after the import do not reach Jotaid, and edits in Jotaid do not reach Stickies.
• It only runs on the Mac. Stickies is a Mac app, so the import lives in Jotaid for Mac. The notes then sync to Jotaid on your iPhone.

Questions

If two stickies have the same first line, do they stay separate?

Yes. Jotaid identifies a sticky by Stickies' own internal ID for it, not by its text, so two stickies that both begin with "Ideas" become two notes with the same title.

What if I run the import twice?

The second run brings over only stickies it has not seen before and tells you how many it skipped. Large collections are imported up to 2,000 stickies at a time; run it again to continue.

My stickies disappeared from the Stickies app. Can Jotaid recover them?

Sometimes. Jotaid reads each sticky's own file in the Stickies data folder rather than the index file that went missing in the reports above. Stickies whose files still hold their text are imported, without a color tag if the color information is gone. If the files themselves are empty, there is nothing to recover, and a Time Machine backup is the place to look.

Do I need Pro?

No. Importing into the Inbox, tags, themes, Card mode, concepts and iCloud sync are all free, with no time limit. Pro adds more projects, AI features such as Smart Theme, and filtering by more than one condition at a time.

Should I just use Apple Notes instead?

If you want your stickies on your iPhone and in one window, Export All to Notes is built in and does that well. The difference is what happens after. Notes gives you a folder per color. Jotaid gives you tags for the colors and a place to sort the notes by what they are about, and then to see which ideas keep coming back.

Sources

• Apple, Stickies User Guide for Mac. support.apple.com/guide/stickies. Every description of Stickies' own features in this article is from this guide.
• Mac-Forums, "Does anyone still use 'Stickies'?", July 2025. mac-forums.com. The quotes about the covered desktop, the diary, the backup routine, keeping stickies on the desktop and the list of stored details.
• MacRumors Forums, "App to Sync Stickies." forums.macrumors.com. The "out of sight, out of mind" quote.
• MacRumors Forums, "stickies, disappearing regularly...", from November 2019. forums.macrumors.com. The reports of lost stickies after the Catalina update and the explanation of the index file.
• Hacker News comments: syncing across devices (2016), converting a sticky into a note (2021), just enough markup (2026).