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Posts Tagged evernote

KanbanFlow – another way to manage complex tasks

Oct 12

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | 1 Comment

Dan Gold’s blog has new entry on Checkvist and how to use it “as an outliner inside a  GTD, workflow”, + integration with Evernote, etc. The guest blogger is a programmer, and Checkvist is too complext and sophisticated for my needs.

But I was interested in Kanbanflow, mentioned in the article.

How is Checkvist integrated in my GTD Workflow ?

(1) In my Kanbanflow process
I just get the public link of my Checkvist document and add it to the description of my Kanban task. This way, I can directly reach my spec through the link inside the task.

I just signed up for a free account at KanbanFlow.

One of the things I like about it, is that I can create “boards” of complext tasks and see all the different bits and their progress at once. You can do something similar in Evernote, by having a “master project note”, as Dan Gold suggests in his ebook, but I like the visual layout of Kanbanflow. Plus it looks cool.

KanbanFlow doesn’t have an app but it does have a mobile site accessible from iPhone and Android devices. (Haven’t tested it yet).

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10 Awesome OneNote Tips You Should Be Using All The Time [Windows]

Aug 29

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | 4 Comments

My posts on One Note vs Evernote are the most popular posts on this blog. So here’s another for y’all.

Brooks Duncan of Documentsnap.com tweets about the following 10 Awesome OneNote Tips article. Here’s a snippet:

I am going to ruffle a few feathers here by saying that Microsoft OneNote is just as good as Evernote. Evernote is probably more barebones and easier to handle, while OneNote is the digital equivalent of a binder, giving you more organizational control.

The showdown will continue, so for the sake of productivity and peace, let’s say that both are great note-taking apps with their pros and cons. I use both, as and when the purpose dictates it. And I have come to love both because they have made me more organized with my note-taking.

We have covered a bit of OneNote’s capabilities with:

But effective note-taking requires as many tips and tricks you can pull together. So, here for your productive pleasure are ten more.

Read more at  10 Awesome OneNote Tips You Should Be Using All The Time [Windows].

“I use both”! Man, I used both a while back and it was Confusion City when it came time to finding something: did I note it in Evernote on OneNote? I still have some notes in OneNote; they’re probably the ones’ I’ve been looking for in Evernote and thinking, Maybe I dreamed it.

I no longer use OneNote, so I haven’t tested the tips myself, but the article includes lots of screenshots which are vital in any explanation of how to do something, especially for a non-geek computer user like me. Video is even better, but screenshots usually do the trick.

Just glancing thru the list of tips, I can’t see anything Evernote can’t do, but they are all useful things to know, such as encrypting notes with private info, OCR capability, and iPhone apps to capture notes when away from your computer.

Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine

By the way, Brooks Duncan is my go-to man for going paperless. I recommend his variously priced guides to going paperless, but if you’re interested in going paperless and still testing the waters, I strongly suggest you take Brooks’ free 7-part email course on the subject, which you can ssign up for at www.DocumentSnap.com.

You can also subscribe to his blog (which today introduces the amazing Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine)

and his YouTube channel (latest video is storing handwritten notes in Evernote).

A very useful tip in one of Brooks’ recent videos is on how to find all the PDF files in Evernote (Answer – type resource:application/pdf into Evernote’s search bar).

I couldn’t find this in Brett Kelly’s Evernote Essentials (which I also recommend, and you can read Brooks’ review of it here), but I did find this one which was equally helpful: how to find all your Evernote audio notes (Answer – type resource:audio/* into Evernote’s search bar).

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn-pQ1caROU’]

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TEC #025 – Brooks Duncan interview – DocumentSnap.com | The Elephant Channel

Aug 10

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | 1 Comment

The Elephant Channel

The Elephant Channel

The Elephant Channel, an unofficial Evernote tips blog, interviews Brooks Duncanof DocumentSnap.com (audio only, so here’s a pic of Brooks).

Brooks Duncan headshot

Brooks Duncan headshot

Check it out.

“During the interview you will hear some of his secrets on how to become paperless as much as possible, how he uses Evernote and more.”

TEC #025 – Brooks Duncan interview – DocumentSnap.com | The Elephant Channel.

Twitter: @documentsnap
Facebook: www.facebook.com/documentsnap

Brooks Duncan is author of a series of “going paperless guides”. Start with the free 7-part email course, then, if you decide to go paperless, I warmly recommend his variously priced guides (NB – I’m an affiliate of Brooks’). Click here to read more about the Paperless Document Organization Guide

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Evernote Stacks – How To Use Them – YouTube

Jul 19

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | Comments off

http://www.documentsnap.com – Evernote Stacks are a way to have subfolders in Evernote, or sub notebooks. This video shows you how stacks work.

via Evernote Stacks – How To Use Them – YouTube.

A useful video on the basics of Evernote’s stacks – what they are, how to use them – from paperless guru Brooks Duncan of DocumentSnap.com

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1CVWdiuEKI’]

Go to www.DocumentSnap.com to sign up for DocumentSnap’s free 7-part email course on going paperless. Then, if you’re still looking for guidance, check out his Paperless Document Organization Guides (from $47) for both Windows and Mac users. (Click-thru and buy one and I get a few bucks from Brooks.)

 

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Evernote + iPad? You need offline notebooks

Apr 8

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | Comments off

iPad/iPhone Evernote offline settings

iPad/iPhone Evernote offline settings

If you’re using Evernote, unless your iPad is 3G and connected to the Innernet-thingy 24/7, you’ll need offline notebooks.

What are offline notebooks? I’m glad you asked! They’re notebooks that you can read even while off-line, that is, even when not connected to the Innernet-thingy. Which in my case is most of the time. My iPad is useful, but it let me down badly when I discovered that my zillion Evernotes were invisible on my iPad: “This note could not be shown because iPad is not connected to the Innernet-thingy”. Swot it said, right there on the screen, when I was in my meeting and I fired up my iPad2. And I was awake and everything, all dressed up but nowhere to go.

So as I’m in a charitable mood, I thought I’d write a post on offline notebooks and how to create them and everything. But then I changed my mind and decided to send you to Hickey’s brilliant post Did You Know: How to Access Notes Without an Internet Connection

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Dan Gold’s popular eBook “Evernote®: The unofficial eBook” is selling like hot cakes

Apr 6

Posted by sheffner in announcement, lifehacks + cooltools | 4 Comments

Mouth-watering mini white chocolate cheesecakes! Yum

Mouth-watering mini white chocolate cheesecakes! Yum

Dan Gold’s e-book Evernote®: The unofficial eBook to capturing everything and getting things done! is selling like hot cakes.

"Evernote: How to capture everything and Get Things Done" by Dan Gold

"Evernote: How to capture everything and Get Things Done" by Dan Gold

It’s just $5, and it gives you a brief but useful guide to setting up Evernote to work as a Getting Things Done (GTD) tool, for both capturing ideas and “next-action” items, and for keeping track of projects and complete items, how to use tags and avoid over-tagging, tips on notebooks, etc., all with a GTD focus. Click the  link or the image on the left to read more about it.

Evernote Logo

I use Evernote, rather than OneNote. I tried OneNote for a while when my  Evernote account froze up, due to the dastardly reason that I was too cheap to cough up the 450 yen/month (4,000 yen/year) for the Premium account. I tried OneNote and I liked the pretty colours and tabs, but I missed the cloud functionality of Evernote. I use Evernote on both work and home desktops and on my iPad (and more recently on my iPhone, too), and all my notes are automatically updated in the cloud. I found OneNote less satisfactory in that regard, as I wrote in an earlier blog-post: “OneNote vs Evernote

OneNote logo

Dan Gold’s eBook is not an introduction to how to Evernote. For that, you need THE Evernote guide, Bret Kelly’s Evernote Essentials, 2nd edition.

Brett Kelly's Evernote Essentials. Click image to read more

Brett Kelly's Evernote Essentials. Click image to read more

And if you know little or nothing about GTD, Dan’s guide is probably not the best place to start. The best place would be THE SOURCE: David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity or website.

Brett Kelly’s guide can be used like a manual: read it through before you open the “box” and start using Evernote, or dipped into when you want to know something esoteric, like how to encrypt the text in a note.

If you have read Dave Allen’s book or are familiar with GTD and would like to know how 1 person (Dan Gold) has set up Evernote to work with GTD, then Dan’s eBook is for you. Dan is a very enthusiastic guy, and his positive feeling pervades his book. He writes simply and with humour.

And his eBook is selling very well. I want to promote books or products I use myself and made by people I respect. Click the image below to find out more about Brooks Duncan’s Paperless Document Organization Guide (for Mac- and Windows-users).

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» Email Zen: Clear Out Your Inbox :zenhabits

Feb 29

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | 4 Comments

Leo Babauta has written several useful posts on GTD. This one is about getting email inbox to zero (Leo uses Gmail), and I’ve emphasised one section:

I have only one folder: Archive. When I respond to an email, or finish reading it if it doesn’t need response, or note it on my to-do list, I archive it. Simple as that. You could add a Read folder if you want. I usually print longer ones to read later, like during lunch or while waiting for something. Other people have an Action folder or a Waiting For folder, but I find that that’s just an additional inbox or “bucket” as GTD’s David Allen calls it that you have to constantly check. I don’t like to check extra folders. I have my to-do lists and my Waiting For list, and that’s good enough. So it’s as simple as pressing “Archive” on an email, and if I need to find it later, Gmail’s search is so good that it’s easy to find. I’ve never had any problems with this system.

via » Email Zen: Clear Out Your Inbox :zenhabits.

Braintoniq, creator of a set of instructional videos on using Evernote for GTD, uses 2 notebooks: Action Pending and Completed. Simple, but this only covers actionable items. Perhaps everything else (project support materials, etc.) is just tagged with no notebook, or does he not store non-GTD items in Evernote? Unthinkable!

I had a ton of notebooks which I’m now whittling down to just 3: ToDo, Reference (everything else non-actionable), and Inbox (unsorted). I use tags to assign  contexts and priorities to the ToDos. One of my ToDo’s is to sort through my 148 Inbox items 🙁

Gmail screenshot

Image via Wikipedia

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The Challenge « The Challenge

Jan 18

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | Comments off

Skitch

Because I’m on Dan Raine’s email list, I was informed about this podcast. In the podcast, I discovered (among other, even more interesting facts) that

In the podcast, Ed or GuruBob says he loves Skitch coz he can just created something then post it online via Posterous. What’s Posterous you ask? Hm, I’ll be browsing the Posterous FAQ before I go to bed tonight.

Chikidaat!

Well 2011 has certainly been a year packed with changes, we have had Google+, the explosion in mobile, and the good old Panda update to name a few of the biggies.2012 is certainly going to bring a few surprises and of course opportunities along with them, so as is tradition Ed has recorded his 2012 predictions podcast which you can listen to or download below.I was supposed to be on the recording but unfortunately had man-flu at the time so Ed is joined by the ever insightful GuruBob.

via The Challenge « The Challenge.

Evernote logo

Evernote.com

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Re-organizing my Evernote notebooks

Jan 7

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | 1 Comment

At the end of last year, veteran newsletter writer and web-surfer Gary North wrote about Evernote:

Internet Explorer offers Favorites. Firefox offers Bookmarks. They do the same thing. With the two clicks of your mouse, you can save a link to a Web article. With a little extra work, you can re-name it. It’s there forever . . . or until you lose your hard disk.

You can also create folders for topics. You can place a link into a folder. You then need to remember the link and the folder — not just the link.

You do this, week after week, month after month. The list grows. You may or may not remember to alphabetize the list. Or you may not know how.

At some point, you may have over 3,000 links. I did.

You cannot search the links with a keyword. Whatever information is available a link click away does not appear on your hard disk. You must remember where a link is in the list.

Then, as links get old, some of them die. You click a link. The page is empty. You don’t recall what was on that now-missing page. You know it was important enough to save the link.

It takes time to go through them one by one in order to cull them.

Like a pile of papers on your desk, the list grows. You know where this is heading — to a digital version of this:

http://www.aetv.com/hoarders/photos/#/hoarders/photos/season-4/Mike-Kitchen-Before.jpg

There is a solution. It’s called Evernote: www.Evernote.com.

via Deliverance from Favorites and Bookmarks: How I Overcame a Crippling Addiction.

Before I started using Evernote, I was using Delicious to bookmark everything I found interesting, including “to read later” items. Delicious works very well as an alternative to bookmarks and Favourites. It’s main advantage is that it is independent of the computer you are on (although it’s a little clunkier to save bookmarks if your computer does not have the Delicious bookmarklet installed), and it is platform-independent.

But last year, Delicious was off-line for extended periods twice within a short time. I decided to move all my Delicious links over to Evernote – all 7,041 of them? Yikes! That could take a while. First, I saved all my delicious bookmarks as an html file and saved it on my hard-drive.

My next Evernote project is to get rid of all my notebooks except my GTD ones: Inbox, Todo, Agenda, Business ideas, Read/Review, Someday/Maybe. All other existing notebooks will be converted to tags. Everything in Evernote is “Reference”. What needs to be specially designated is specific “Next Actions”.

Another advantage is I can put items into several “categories” at once. Items can be project support materials, project details and also GTD items (such as Read/Review). Once I’ve read it or performed the action, I just delete the “read/review” tag.

This reduces the number of steps that need to be taken with each note, and it also facilitates searching on ipad, where the layout is different from on pc.

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Evernote offline notebook blues

Dec 8

Posted by sheffner in lifehacks + cooltools | Comments off

Oh, dear. I’d paid my Evernote premium membership and was now happy to have my offline notebooks on my iPad.

But wait! Changes I made to notes on my iPad don’t get synced.

Well, of course not, dummy, they’re OFF-LINE. That’s what you asked for, that’s what you got.

So, I go into my settings and set those notebooks to online. But now  I’m left with the OLD online note, and the changes I made on my iPad have disappeared.

Speaking of working on the iPad, it really isn’t that great, is it? For reading, or viewing – fine! But it’s really not cut out for productive work.

I wasted a good 20 minutes trying to write an Evernote on my iPad using bullet points, numbered lists, underlines, etc. Problems occurred when I tried copying and pasting – the order of the lists changed; numbered or bullet points suddenly lost their bullet or number, words or lines suddenly disappeared and popped up somewhere else in the document. Weird.

Note to self: don’t “work” on your iPad – just read (and delete). For real work, use your pc.

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