Revamping my Evernote. Why?

• I had too many tags (over 1,000)
• Too many notebooks (around 60)
• Too many “todo’s” scattered across 1 ToDo notebook and 1 ToDo tag (what the…?)
• Notes piling up unattended to in my inbox and ToDo tag and notebook
• Not doing regular daily, weekly and monthly reviews.

1. Mission creep was affecting my original purpose for using Evernote.
   1. My original purpose was to use EN as
      1. an archive of ideas for the future, as well as reference materials for present and possible future projects, and
      2. my GTD system.
2. BUT I was spending too much time collecting notes and clippings, and not enough time reviewing them and/or using them for live projects.
3. Too many ToDos and ToReads and Someday/Maybes piling up.
   1. Why? Probably because these items do not pop up on my radar screen when they should, or as often as they should.
   2. Why not?
      1. Probably partly because I’m not conducting regular Daily and Weekly Reviews.
4. Too many clippings.
5. Too many notebooks, meaning too much time spent deciding which notebook to file a note under.
6. Too many occasions when I was unable to locate the note I wanted because I could not search across multiple notebooks (but you can search across multiple tags).
7. Storing too much and not trashing enough, i.e. not reviewing old clippings or other notes and discarding things I no longer need. Being too much of a packrat, in short.
8. Lost track of my projects: too many items labelled as “projects” which weren’t.
   1. Solution: review David Allen’s definition of “project”, and re-label my “projects” which aren’t really projects (actions that require more than 2 steps).
9. Lost track of my long-term goals, visions, etc.; my 30-, 40- and 50,000-feet perspectives.
   1. Possible solution: regular reviews (Daily, Weekly, Monthly)
   2. This means that my long-term goals and visions, etc., need to come up on my radar on a regular basis, in one or more of my reviews.
   3. That means organizing my saved searches.

I decided to re-read Ruud Hein’s article on using Evernote to GTD, where he describes in detail his extensive use of saved searches to make sure what needs to come up does actually come up. That is (for me) the biggest lesson of GTD: something important you must take to work the next day, you put it on your shoes or right in front of the front door, so next morning when you’re still bleary and fuzzy despite your coffee, you stumble over this and think, “What the heck? … Oh yeah, I gotta take this to work” and you pick it up and take it. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: @Productivity, evernote

Today was a weird day weather-wise: temperature started high (yesterday was 24 degrees C, May temperatures for this part of Japan) then the sky darkened, it rained and the temperature fell (4 degrees C @ 5 pm). Apart from a short trip to the video store and to buy something for lunch, my daughter and I have stayed indoors.

I’ve spent much of the weekend happily trawling through SF author Rubin’s excellent series of posts about using Evernote to go paperless. Rubin does not use Evernote for Getting Things Done (he prefers a geeky program called ToDo.txt).

Last year I re-organized my Evernote structure to include a GTD component, but Rubin’s prime purpose for Evernote is to “remember everything”, i.e. as a timeline or record of what he and his family does, goes, buys, creates, reads, etc.

This has prompted me to review what I use Evernote for.

One things I’ve learned is that there can be as many organizational schemes as there are people using Evernote. There is no wrong or right way to do it. What I describe below works for me because it meets the goals I set out from the very start. And while the organizational scheme you choose may look entirely different, it should be based on a clear set of goals. You should be asking yourself: why are you trying to organize your notes in the first place?

via Going Paperless: A Closer Look at How I Organize My Notes In Evernote | Jamie Todd Rubin.

He offers his list of objectives for using Evernote. What’s yours?

• Capture all paper that comes into my life in digital format.
• Capture all events and milestones in a timeline.
• Have the simplest possible unambiguous taxonomy.
• Maximize the automatic creation and organization of notes
• Find what I am looking for in less than 5 seconds.

The “timeline” use of Evernote is something I had not really thought of before (though as Rubin points out, it fits exactly Evernote’s slogan “remember everything”), but I can see advantages, e.g. creating a digital house (have you ever found yourself at the store, unable to remember the exact size of something in your home?), and keeping track of books read, software installed, purchases made, children’s milestones, year-end baselines (sounds particularly interesting and potentially useful).

Rubin is also an enthusiast of automation and finds ways to automate his Evernoting as much as possible. Some involves scripting with Perl and simla stuff which I’m too lazy to learn, but there’re clever things with IFTTT that I might try out (tho I can’t seem to get IFTTT to work with Twitter).

Rubin’s also alerted me to an Evernote addon or plugin called Clearly which does what I’ve been using Readability (the great thing about Readability is being able to send a copy of the stripped-down article to my Kindle and then read it on my iPad later – a completely wireless and automatic transfer). But Clearly does something which neither Readability nor Evernote does and that is allow you to highlight text in a clipping.

Yet another thing I learned from Rubin’s series on going paperless is a reminder to make greater use of Evernote’s search facilities. This involves learning more search syntax. Here’s Rubin’s post on his 10 most frequently used saved searches.

One I’m going to use straight away is “created:day-7” to bring up all the notes I created in the last week. The point of this is to see exactly what I actually use Evernote for (rather than what I think I use it for).

Tags: @Productivity, evernote

The other day I blogged about a useful Evernote tip by Jamie Todd Rubin, SF writer. I’ve since discovered he’s an Evernote Paperless Ambassador and has written a truckload of articles on this subject, all elegantly written with colourful screenshots and hand-drawn diagrams. I’ve stored them all in my Evernote “To Read” stack.

I’m going to be spending the next few days digesting them and re-organizing my Evernote notebooks and tags. Good time for a long overdue spring cleaning, and I’ll be using Rubin’s tips on archiving and backing up my Evernotes.

Going Paperless

Below is a condensed index of my weekly Going Paperless tips that I do in my capacity as Evernote’s Paperless Lifestyle Ambassador. These weekly tips are also available via RSS. Below the index are some supplementary posts I’ve done that may be of interest to folks.

Going Paperless

• How I Title My Notes in Evernote March 5, 2013
• The Going Paperless FAQ February 26, 2013
• Quantified Self and Evernote February 19, 2013 (read more)

via Going Paperless | Jamie Todd Rubin.

Related articles

• Ask an Expert: All About Paperless Living
• Going Paperless: How I Title My Notes in Evernote | Jamie Todd Rubin
• Wrapping Up the Evernote Paperless Challenge
• Forget the paperless office, start with the paperless meeting

Tags: @Productivity, evernote

I’m an Evernote fan, and always eager to learn how to use it more effectively. Here’s a tip I learned today. I usually don’t touch the “create date” because I never use for search purposes, but I can see the value of tweaking the date so that it becomes easier to find the document you want. Click this link to read all 5 tips.

Tip #3: Don’t include information in the title you can get from elsewhere in the note

Indeed, when I scan a document, I set the “create date” of the document to the date listed on the document. In this way, if someone refers to “the letter dated February 25, 2013″, I don’t have to search the text of the notes, I can simply search for any note with a create date of 2/25/2013. Here’s one such example from yesterday’s mail. I received a letter from Wells Fargo, which I scanned in yesterday (March 4):

Letter date

Note that while the note was actually scanned on March 4, the Created date was changed to match the date on the letter (February 25). The updated date is the date that the letter was actually scanned. (I didn’t have to change that date at all). Moreover, note the title. It is simple and to the point:

Wells Fargo Letter on Home Rebate Credit

It’s possible I have 2 or 3 notes with this exact title, but the dates will help me figure out which one I am looking for.

via Going Paperless: How I Title My Notes in Evernote | Jamie Todd Rubin.

Tags: @Productivity, evernote