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Slacker Manager

Evernote and note management

by Bren on November 18th, 2004

I try to pay attention to coincidence and convergence.  That is, I try to notice when I’m exposed to new tools or ideas with relative frequency in a short (1 or 2 weeks?) period of time.  Evernote hit my threshold a couple of weeks ago and I downloaded the app.  I didn’t install it until today, though, after it popped up again yesterday.  Well, I like it.  Its core purpose is to keep your accumulated notes in one place, and I really like that idea.  It reminds me of a personal wiki, but with more context.  Of course, the next question for me is how is this better than Lookout or a similar search engines?  I’m not sure yet whether it is.  My big concern is that Evernote, by definition, introduces yet another step in my note management process.  Right now, I just keep various text files in the My Documents folder and I can pretty much find what I want using either Lookout, or the ‘Search Files’ function in CrimsonEditor.  I don’t have to be careful about assigning tags, categories, or other metadata to the text files.  Evernote would have me take the two extra steps of drag/drop (or copy/paste) my file into its interface, and assign tags to identify the document.  My hesitation with Evernote revolves around whether those extra steps are worth the effort.  Time will tell.

I’ve still got a learning curve coming up with Evernote.  One of the first things I tried to do was drag an email message into the interface.  I assumed it would somehow put the whole text in Evernote and datestamp it.  All I got, though, was a cryptic message of "Subject Received" and a datestamp.  No text.  Does this mean I have to open the email and copy/paste the text into Evernote?  Apparently.  That’s a lot of extra thinking that I don’t want to do.

On the upside, Evernote will accept way, way more than just your plain text files.  So if you decide that the app is going to be your personal data warehouse, you can drop scanned images in there and all kinds of other documents.  In a way, it reminds me of Enfish, which I used for a little while back in the day and really liked also.  Another nice thing about Evernote is the templating feature.  There are several templates available on the Evernote website, and they seem pretty simple to build, so I’d expect to see a lot more in the future.  Templates just help with note creation.  There are templates for ToDo lists (dated and undated), shopping lists, and expenses.  Evernote is also getting ported to PDAs and phones, so if you become a user, you should have no excuse for losing notes.  Evernote seems to be aiming for ubiquity (FINALLY!  I was able to use ‘ubiquity’ in context!).

So here’s a first shot at some ‘best practice’ tips that may be helpful with note management, regardless of your tool of choice. 

  1. First, keep all your notes in one place (Hey! Michael Hyatt agrees…. Where’d he go, by the way?  I love his blog and it’s been a month since an update.  A month!).  If you’ve got a decent search tool, it shouldn’t matter where you keep your stuff, but keeping everything in one folder helps with backups, and a little bit with indexing speed. ‘My Documents’ works for me, most of the time.  I say most of the time because there are some times when I’m at home and wish I had a file that’s on my work network.  Or vice versa.  I know that tools like TightVNC solve this, but I haven’t spent the time to get it working for me.  Once you’ve got everything in one place, find a decent search tool.  Lookout does the trick for me, but others find Google Desktop to work pretty well.  There’s also a whole market of tools like Enfish, x1, The Brain, and so on, which will do similar organizing, indexing and searching for you. 
  2. Another tip is to be verbose–don’t be skimpy on the notes, or it’ll be more difficult to find them later.  Expand on the ideas, and then keep on expanding.  The more text you have, the easier it’ll be to find since you’ll be able to search on more words and phrases.
  3. Keep your notetaking tool open and available all the time. CrimsonEditor is always open on my desktop.  I find that if I have to stop what I’m doing and wait for an app to open, I’m more likely to try to keep that note in my head, instead of in a context list, or something similar.  And keeping it in my head doesn’t last very long.

Another option for getting your notes anywhere is Webnote.  Webnote has the benefit of being web-ified and available anywhere you’ve got a connection, but it’s strictly text.  It does have a nice visual element to it, and since it’s web-ified you can share it with others.  That said, I can’t imagine how it would be useful to me so I haven’t done more than fiddle around with the public version.

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