This is an interlude in the ongoing series GTD for Academics that I have been posting. The most recent post (see below) has links to all the posts in the series so far.
- By using Evernote to organize every part of my professional (and personal) life, I have everything I need in one place. Whether I’m on my laptop, my tablet, or my phone, I always have access to my documents, and that means I’m always prepared, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.
- Setup Difficulty Level: Easy. Maintenance Level: Easy. One of the biggest dangers when.
- Using these tags lets me use Evernote’s search to instantly find conversations I’ve had with my roommate about whether or not ghosts are real. The second is called. Knowledge and contains.
Create a new note Mac Click the green + New Note button at the top of the left panel. Windows Click the green + New Note button at the top of the left panel. IPhone, iPad, and iPod touch The new Evernote for iOS: Tap the green New note button. Older version of Evernote for iOS. Android The new.
In my last post, I went into some (!) detail about simple trusted systems and their use in Getting Things Done (GTD). While GTD is about acquiring good habits of mind and making pos itive changes to one's behavior about work, having good tools at hand helps to make the habits more habitual. And by 'good' we mean simple and trustworthy. It shouldn't be hard to learn or use the tools for productivity, and we shouldn't spend much, if any, energy thinking about or messing around with the tools.
I also wrote about using three main tools to do GTD: Google Calendar, ToDoist, and Evernote. These are used, respectively, for calendar items, action lists, and filing away information for later use. There was nothing to say about Google Calendar; I wrote a huge amount about ToDoist. But I wanted to save Evernote until now because the first post was already crazy long, and because a lot of people seem to struggle with how to use Evernote in a consistent way. I know that I did, for a long time. So I'd like to lay out my philosophy and practice of use --- and to defend the concept of paying for Evernote.
What is Evernote and what does it have to do with GTD?
Evernote can do so many different things in so many different ways, it's hard to describe exactly what it is. But here's an attempt. Evernote is basically a digital filing cabinet. It functions around the concept of a note, which is like a file on your computer, except it's not exactly a file but more like a container. What do you put into this container? Just about anything. Examples:
- You can create a note and just type text into it, and use it for storing thoughts, drafts of blog posts, meeting notes, etc. It has a reasonably-OK text editor (I would be much happier if it used Multimarkdown) so the experience using it for text is a bit like using Word.
- You can create a note and make a recording and store that in the note.
- You can drag-and-drop other files into a note, like PDFs or images.
- Evernote offers a browser extension you can use to clip items from the web, and store those as notes.
- There are lots of third-party apps that integrate with Evernote, so pretty much anytime you encounter a thing on your computer, there's a pretty good chance you can send it to Evernote from within the app in which you found it.
And once you've created a note, Evernote synchronizes them, and they become accessible on any device with Evernote installed. And it works on almost any device --- macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and through a web browser. (No native Linux client, but there are some approved third-party apps for Linux.) This means that digital stuff that you save to Evernote becomes accessible anywhere you have a digital device.
Much like tasks in ToDoist, notes can have metadata added to them in the form of tags. These are labels added to notes that just add information to the notes to help in searching and organizing. You can also add date-based reminders to notes, share notes using public or private links, and collaborate on notes with other Evernote users.
Evernote organizes notes into folders which are nothing more than collections of notes that you create. Folders can be grouped together too, into what are called stacks.
I think the major strength of Evernote, much like the major strength of ToDoist, is its search function. You can search Evernote for any kind of text whatsoever, not only tags and notebooks but also text in the title or body of a note. What's amazing to me is Evernote's OCR capabilities which allow you to search for text within the body of an image. Here's an example from a photo I took of a whiteboard brainstorming session:
One common use of Evernote for me is to scan in paper documents (I like the Scannable app on my iPad), put the PDF or JPG into Evernote, and then shred the original. It makes going almost-paperless very easy, and best of all I can search up these documents later.
Evernote's search is unbelievably fast and accurate. And the power of this search is what makes it so useful for GTD.
In the processing habit of GTD, we go through all the stuff that we collected since the last processing session, one item at a time, and decide first whether the item is actionable or not. If it is, then it gets further processed into an action list. But many times, the item is not actionable, and we have to decide whether it should be deleted, filed away, or put into a Someday/Maybe list. Evernote is a really good choice for the second option, filing away. If the item is not actionable but still useful --- as reference material for an active project, as a record that you want to have available in case it's needed, etc. --- then you can send the item into Evernote and file it away. In case you need it, you can search it up. It works like a filing cabinet with the ability to find the thing you're looking for.
How I use Evernote
I started using Evernote back around 2010, just a couple of years after it came out of beta. I struggled to find a smooth workflow for using it for a long time. I still think the way I use it is not simple enough, but it's getting there. Here is the setup I use, and the workflow that uses it.
First, I have set up the following notebooks in Evernote:
- A notebook called +INBOX that is used for all incoming stuff. (The '+' symbol forces Evernote to keep it at the top of the notebook list.)
- One notebook for each active project that I have going (so, between 20-30 of these at any given time) all collected in a stack called PROJECTS.
- A notebook called Records for any note that does not belong to a particular project, including notes from projects that have been complete. (As of this writing I have 3149 notes in Records.)
There's also a notebook called Trash that Evernote puts in automatically that contains all deleted notes.
When I'm processing inboxes, I do exactly as I described above: when an item isn't actionable but it's still potentially useful, I put it into Evernote. The most common way I do this is by forwarding items from my email into Evernote via a special email address (just like you can forward stuff from email to ToDoist). I have it set up so that all emails forwarded to Evernote end up in the +INBOX notebook. I can also enter stuff into Evernote by dragging and dropping files onto the Evernote icon in my Macbook's dock, using the web clipper, or using the 'Share' button in an app.
Usually once a week at my weekly review time, I go through all the stuff in +INBOX and do two things to each note: add tags, and then move the note to its appropriate notebook.
With tagging, I use a combination of three tags on each note: the semester in which the note was created (for example, w17 is the tag for this semester, Winter 2017), the project to which it belongs (if there is one), and the life area most closely related to it (Teaching, Scholarship, Service, Personal, etc. -- I discussed these in the ToDoist post). The tags just make searching easier. For example, if I'm trying to find an email and I can only remember a few specific things about it, but I happen to know that it happened in Fall 2013, I can add f13 to a search and get better results.
Then once a note is tagged, I move it out of +INBOX and into one of two notebooks: If it belongs to a project, it gets moved to the project notebook. If it doesn't, it gets moved to Records.
Adding tags and moving it to the right notebook is just a matter of 5-10 seconds of typing in two text fields:
(This is how it works on a Mac. Unfortunately it requires a bit more work on iOS and a lot more work on Android, which is something I wish the Evernote people would change.)
You might be wondering why I tag some notes with their project names and file them away in a project notebook, thereby entering in the same info twice on the same note. I do this because because the notebooks are for active projects. But once a project is done, I still would like to be able to access the notes from that project by name; but I don't want to have the notebook there anymore cluttering up my screen. So when a project is done, I move all of its notes to Records and then delete the (now-empty) notebook. The notes are still in the system and accessible by project name, but not in the same place where the active projects are housed.
For example, I often find myself needing to look up a note, and I don't remember exactly what I titled it, but I do remember it was from the Fall 2015 version of MTH 325 or from an NSF grant that I worked on in 2012. With that much info I can search up the tag And usually find it fairly quickly.
In reality, none of these notebooks or tags are really even necessary because of how good Evernote's search function is. If I can just remember the first or last name of a student who sent me an email in 2014 about a thing with MTH 325, I can search under the name and 'mth 325' and find it quickly. The tags and notebooks just make it cleaner and the searches more foolproof. That's why I am OK with dumping all my non-actionable stuff into +INBOX and leaving it there, and only processing it once a week. If I need something, I can usually find it just with a search and don't need the tags so much.
So Evernote forms the third leg of my GTD tripod, as it were. Google Calendar is for date-related stuff; ToDoist is for action lists; Evernote is where I put stuff that I might need to reference.
Diversion: Why, for me, Evernote is worth the money
Like a lot of software today, Evernote has multiple tiers of use: a free version that allows basic use, and paid versions that unlock some or all the full feature set. For Evernote, there is a free version, a 'Plus' version for $35 per year, and the 'Premium' version for $70 per year. The differences in the plans are spelled out here.
The prices and plan differences didn't use to be as they are now. They are the result of a highly controversial change in the plans and pricing of Evernote products made back in the summer of 2016. There were two items in particular that made this change controversial. First, the Premium price went up from $6 per month to $8 per month, and the free version became limited to only synchronizing across two different devices. When those changes were put into place, many Evernote users were upset about it. Really upset. Many of them jumped ship and started using OneNote, or some other alternative. And on the way out, some of them vented their fury into comment sections and /r/Evernote and all sorts of other places.
I am sticking with Evernote for the long haul, despite these changes, because for my use case --- thousands of notes, referenced constantly from multiple devices and containing all manner of data --- Evernote is the best option and it's far and away worth $70 per year, which is less than the amount I spent the last time my family (of five) went out for dinner. For others, this price may not be worth it. In particular if you are just using plain text notes and not many of them, then Evernote is too much firepower. But if you are doing anything beyond the basics, you need a professional tool, and Evernote is that tool.
I am fully aware of OneNote. In fact, when this story broke last year, I started looking into getting out of Evernote. I started using OneNote on a regular but limited basis, for just one purpose: To import and annotate academic papers and taking committee meeting notes. I used it almost every day for a semester. There were some things that I liked about OneNote. But, these were far outweighed by the interminable problems I had: constant crashing, data loss, data corruption, and minutes-long sync times just to name a few. To clarify: this was on macOS, iOS, and Android. The impression I get is that on Windows, it's a much different animal. But I don't use Windows, and anyway this shouldn't matter. The fact is that OneNote failed the job interview for being a trusted system. Evernote isn't perfect[1] but it has never been untrustworthy, and it can be made simple.
So when I have a system in front of me that truly works --- even if imperfectly, and Evernote is definitely not perfect --- I am more than happy to pay for it.
For example, how is it possible that the editor still feels like 2005-era MS Word? And no support for Multimarkdown or code syntax highlighting? This is 2017, right? ↩︎
One of the best things you can do to clear your head and to improve your level of self-awareness is to journal. There is nothing quite like being able to empty out your thoughts in a place that is for you and you alone. Journaling allows you to reflect and then adjust your plan for tomorrow and beyond.
At first glance, you may think it takes too much time to journal. Sure, if you decide to journal on paper that can be a valid point (The Five Minute Journal makes it easier as do several other books designed specifically for journaling). The good news is you also have the option to use technology to create a journal entry in just a matter of seconds.
While there are dedicated applications for journaling available, there is one app that many people already use that can be adapted for journaling quickly and easily.
And that app is Evernote.
Why Evernote?
Evernote has several built-in features that help simplify journaling. Here are a few reasons why it is my journaling app of choice.
First off, Evernote is accessible from a variety of devices. This means you can begin your entry at the office for work tracking and then at home you can add to that entry to discuss other home and life matters, all without skipping a beat.
Second, Evernote has location awareness built in. So if you’re traveling, you’ll get to see where you were when writing entries and what time of year you were there.
Third, you don’t just need to do written entries in Evernote. You can also do audio entries or use an image to represent (or go along with) a written entry. This versatility makes it a real journaling powerhouse.
Finally, Evernote has incredible search options. So if you want to look back at entries when you decided to try to become a morning person to see if it’s worthwhile for you (Hint: it often doesn’t make a difference to your productivity), then you could use tags for entries or simply search the text in notes based on “morning person” or “early riser”. You can also search images that have words in it, thanks to Evernote’s amazing OCR (optical character recognition) technology. If you want a journaling app that can find whatever you’ve written with just a few keystrokes, Evernote has got you covered.
How to Start
If you’ve been looking to start the journaling habit, it is important to start simple so you can build momentum and see your progress. Let’s go through what you need to do to set up an ongoing journaling setup in Evernote.
Step 1: Create a Notebook for the Current Year
Creating a notebook in Evernote is pretty basic stuff, so all you need to do is create a notebook that you’ll use exclusively for journaling. Ideally, you should name your notebook with the year of the journal first (as numbers sort higher in Evernote than letters), but you can always place an asterisk or an underscore in front of the notebook name if you don’t want to go that route. Books excel for mac.
If you want to create separate notebooks for each month, you can do that as well. But I must warn you that can get pretty unwieldy and you can only have a limited number of notebooks in Evernote. I recommend you go with one notebook per journal year and just take it from there.
Step 2: Use Separate Notes for Each Entry
Each journal entry should have its own note. If you want to have multiple entries per day, just edit the note you used earlier in the day. This keeps it simple and clean, so that the notebook doesn’t get too overwhelming.
I recommend using the date to name each entry as this keeps the notebook cleaner. If you would like to title them differently, then you’ll still know when each entry was created thanks to Evernote’s “Note Created” field. You can always edit that field if you want (as you can see in the image below) but I think it’s best to leave it be. The “Note Updated” field is another nice feature in that it tells you when you last edited the note. This is particularly useful if you add to that entry throughout the day.
Don’t forget that you can use your voice to take notes into your Evernote app if you want to speed up the process – at least on the Mac and iOS. Speech to text on both of these operating systems works quite well in Evernote. Just be sure to go back and re-read what was transcribed so that nothing gets lost in the translation.
Step 3: Create a Reminder Note
If you’re new to this whole journaling thing, then you’ll want to keep yourself on top of the ritual. That means finding a way to trigger when to do your next entry. If you’re not using features in a task management application or calendar to act as a daily reminder, then Evernote can help you out on this front.
As you can see in the image above, Evernote allows you to set a single reminder in a note but it won’t make it repeating. That means that when you create a note to act as reminder to do your journal entry, you’ll only be able to set the reminder for one date.
So what I do is set it for the next day (after all, I’m already in Evernote and ready to go with today’s entry) and set the ideal time for me to be reminded. I like to journal before bed as part of my evening routine, so my time is set to 11:00 PM. Then every time I go into Evernote to write a new entry, I simply go into this reminder note and set a reminder for the next day.
Again, it’s not the most elegant of solutions, but it works. There are plenty of other ways to create this reminder. But if you want to get used to the idea of going into Evernote daily to write in your journal, this will definitely help you do that.
Step 4: Write on
Using Evernote Tags
The last step is both the simplest and the hardest: write in your Evernote journal notebook every day. No matter what. Build that habit. Your future self will thank you for it.
(As an added bonus, you’ll also get better at using Evernote!)
This is just the beginning of using Evernote for your journaling habit. Once you’ve got this process down, you’ll be able to find new ways to make your Evernote journal even better. Here are just a few of those enhancements:
- Create a menu Shortcut to make finding your journal faster.
- Create appropriate tags so that you can highlight milestones in your journal.
- Create a Journaling Notebook Stack so that you can combine yearly journal into one convenient location.
- Create automation routines in IFTTT so that some journal entries pretty much write themselves!
I’ll dive deeper into these topics and other ways to make Evernote an even better journaling tool in a future post. Until then, start with the basics and keep writing in your journal every day.
And start doing that today!
One of the key components of TimeCrafting is completing a Daily Log, which is basically a fancy name for journaling. You can learn more about other components of the productivity method that I’ve created and we teach at Productivityist by clicking here.
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Using Evernote As Crm
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