Category Archives: WebClipperClearly

Number 3 Reason GTDers Don’t Use Evernote … after installing Evernote

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TLDR: Why people set up and then don’t use Evernote

  1. The first reason is that implementing GTD changes too many things at once.
    So, Evernote, even if it is installed and working, won’t be used. Evernote is a sub-casualty of the 83% failure rate of GTD implementations.
  2. The second reason is because we blow off the GTD weekly reviews, infecting our GTD system with guilt that comes into focus (like a magnifying glass starting a fire) when we sit down to use Evernote. End result is we stop sitting down to our computers and stop using Evernote. *Note* This is also why people stop using Outlook, Omni-Focus, etc. for GTD.
  3. The third reason why GTD people don’t use Evernote after implementing it, that Evernote can be implemented in too many ways. And, … no two ways to implement Evernote agree. Too many choices to an overwhelmed brain = no choice. So, stop web surfing about Evernote, and start experimenting with your own work.

If you too have abandoned Evernote while trying to implement GTD, please share why?

Done! Good! Now go buy something to organize with, on Amazon! Invest in organization.

Introduction:

Why GTD people stop using Evernote is a surprisingly popular topic. So, I’m going to identify a couple more of the big reasons that GTD people stop using Evernote. This post is about reason 3, how the many alternative ways of implementing Evernote, stop people from using Evernote.

My_First_Comedy_Show_Ever___A_Stand_Up_Life

Source: .com

The perfect illustration of a GTD user implementing Evernote is not just a deer in headlights. The perfect illustration is a deer in a dozen of the spot lights used in police helicopters to run down fugitives.

User: “I think I’ll try using Evernote”

  • {event} Client installation on an iPad happens
    (10% of users who attempt to install quit here)

    • Wait, what? Why aren’t people installing Evernote on their PCs first? Seems that the PC is passing in influence. See RestartGTD’s Browser De Jure page for GTD viewership. GTD like it or not is becoming an iPad thing.
  • {event} Account setup happens
    (50% of potential users quit here)
  • {event does not happen} Opening Evernote for the first time on iPad
    (25% of potential users quit here)
  • {event} User opens Evernote for the first time

Even if we give Evernote 100% of the loyal users who open Evernote on their iPad for the first time, Evernote has still lost 85% of its users by the time a user opens Evernote for the first time.

Worse success rate than a David Allen GTD seminar!

Of course, I could be wrong about the percentages above. Still … Evernote is computer (desktop or laptop) first. With its new users swarming in from iPad and iPhone land, there are going to be a lot of wasteful problems (from the perspective of GTD).

For example,

  • once the person who has followed the steps above sees their Evernote account, what will they see? None of their existing information. = #EvernoteProblem
  • how can we fix this?
    • By installing Evernote Web Clipper and Clearly for a week or 10 days, so the user has some web-browsing history built up, that s/he will recognize when Evernote first opens. = #EvernoteProblem
    • By *distracting* the user to next import their paper with a scanner (scroll down to the file cabinet picture) before they open Evernote. Oh, crap, this requires Evernote to be installed on a PC with a scanner. Oops. = #EvernoteProblem
    • By scanning directly from scanner to Evernote on iPad or phone.
    • Without something drastic, can we fix this?

Hypothesis:

= #EvernoteProblem * #GTD Problem = .15 *.17 = Success Rate of Evernote & GTD

.15*.17=.03 Or, 3%

Ouch!

How can trying to implement Evernote with GTD be a good idea if it kills off an additional 14% of successful GTD users beyond what David Allen’s Company experiences?

  1. Once a GTD user puts their information into Evernote, it becomes easier to do reference filing correctly, than to not do reference filing. Reference filing is a keystone GTD skill. This helps *a lot* with people staying with GTD!
  2. Those 14% of GTD users were going to fade anyway. I *think* this because I talk to people who are “formerly known as GTD users” and they say “I use about 50% of GTD. I was really into it at first, but then it became too much to keep up with.”
    • Why? When I ask, “Do you use Evernote web clipper?” they invariably say “What is Evernote Web Clipper?”
    • Hypothesis: 14% of GTD users would be saved if they tried Evernote for their reference filing.
  3. Evernote is a platform, not a well-known, habitually used product. So what?
    • So … the marketeers at Evernote are clueless at how to help people who have a dozen police helicopter spot lights in their eyes. Platforms give markets new-to-the-world-capabilities, marketing people are trained to more efficiently sell old-to-the-world-capabilities.
    • So … in GTD terms, a new platform allows us to experiment with new degrees of freedom in organizing. The way our brains work with new platforms is trial and error. Our brains will try using the electronic tools, then pull back and compost on how the new platform *feels*. Then, confidence in a new way to use the tool appears from nowhere, and we implement the tool. And iterate improvements from there.

BIG Evernote LESSON FOR GTD USERS:

Don’t web surf to figure out how to use Evernote. Experiment with your own next actions, projects, reference filing, and inboxing. See what pleases you and run with that. When you feel *hindered* by Evernote, stop doing that. 

You can start with paper, that worked for me! See GTD Time Lapse for my 5 year history of GTD evolution.

You can go all digital. That did not work for me. I went back to paper + Evernote.

The trick is to start. Don’t think “I can’t start without the perfect system.” Think, what can I improve the most, with the least effort. Or, better, what would be fun to really focus on and improve? After 200+ MBA students, I think getting a ScanSnap and Evernote going as your reference filing system can’t be beat.

Whatever you do, keep evolving your GTD. GTD is like a bicycle. When you stop moving, you fall over.

bill meade

3 click image capture with Evernote Web Clipper

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Source: Booboo via BookPorn

A key use of Web Clipper is to capture images you’d like to review later. You can capture pretty much any graphic on the internet in 3 clicks. For example, during my daily BookPorn fix on April 3, 2014. I saw the above image. Having a 5,000 volume library, I have a soft spots for book pornography. I thought “That is the smartest looking G Pig I’ve ever seen. Might be useful for a blog post, I’ll grab it.”

Once you have Evernote Web clipper installed, here is how easy it is to capture a graphic in three mouse clicks:

Once the image is inside Evernote, the note looks like this (*Note* the web link is captured along with the graphic):

Simple really!

bill meade

What is Evernote Clearly?

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Evernote-Quick-Tips2

Clearly it is … not all that clear … what Clearly is …

Evernote has a web page at: https://evernote.com/clearly/guide/ that shows you how Clearly works and what you can do with it.

WTGTD?

Given that Web Clipper exists … why does Clearly exist? And do I really need Clearly?

Q. Why does clearly exist?

A. I don’t know.

I *speculate* however, that there is a technology industry programming story novella behind why Clearly exists in parallel to Web Clipper. So, here we go …

In the big inning, was Web Clipper. Evernote *intuitively* understood that they needed an on ramp from the internet. So Web Clipper was developed. I *hypothesize* that Evernote whipped the slaves (in as much as Evernote can whip slaves who the company pays to have employee houses cleaned twice a month) to get Web Clipper done quickly.

This is not that big a deal except, creating Web Clipper created a team with a common bond of being whipped slaves (who have their houses cleaned for free). Programmers anywhere in near approximation to the word TEAM require me to point out the mother of all knowledge-worker-team books PEOPLEWARE by DeMarco and Lister. Because software teams are special, awesome, and if they release a product, powerful in nerd culture.

Then someone not on the Web Clipper team had an idea of making a “more pure” tool to bridge from the internet into user databases.

*Aside*

No. I do not have any leaked proprietary information Evernote. I’ve just seen this happen many times, at so many companies, that the finger prints of this kind of bifurcating product effort, do not even belong to the individual perpetrators. They belong to class events.

For example, I worked for a general manager at HP who built a high performance team around his product. The high performance team got their product (a not-HP3000) to out-perform the HP3000.

Unforgivable.

Sin.

/*Aside*

So, in our novella, the *insiders* are the Web Clipp-istas. And, the outsiders are the Clearly-purists. Once you have true outsiders within a company’s software ecology, you have evolved a new species of team that defines itself in being “not” the defacto internet-to-Evernote team. The result of two software teams doing similar but-politically-separate things is …

yts3hd2

Source: Cafe Press Your Team Sucks

For example … IBM’s “black” team (DeMarco & Lister Kindle Book L1849 Chapter 19). A gelled team inside IBM that delighted in making other software teams cry.

Think of the Web Clip-istas as Bill Clinton, and the Clearly-purists as the Republican party. As the republican party develops TRUE differentiation, Bill Clinton would shift to “the middle” and suck out the differentiation’s soul like a dementor … 

I_got_your_back-600x500
Source: PrestigeDetail.Ca

So, now we know the ecology of two teams running in parallel inside Evernote, why does Clearly exist? Well … initially, it was because Clearly did something that Web Clipper did not do (stripping out useless screen elements). Today, however, Clearly exists as the reading-R&D function for the Web Clipper team.

Wait, what?

Web Clipper has moved to incorporate the functionality developed by the Clearly team. So now with clearly you have A LOT OF OPTIONS (see red arrows) about what to capture …

Sandboxed_applications_for_GNOME__part_2_and_Microsoft_Word

… and, Clearly, has few options.  When you use Clearly, it is cleaner than using Web Clipper because Clearly takes you right into the “simplified article” view (2nd red arrow above). Usually this works. Sometimes not. When “simplified article” does not work, Web Clipper is head and shoulders above Clearly in functionality.

So, Web Clipper by having Clearly’s “back” is the superset of functionality. And clearly, is the cutting edge.

Back to the question: And do I really need Clearly?

The simple answer is “no.” All a GTD person needs is Evernote Web Clipper. Evernote Clearly though awesome, though powerful, though it be ahead of Web Clipper, is the product of the marginalized software team.

Web Clipper in its myriad options (red arrows in image above) has more capabilities than Clearly. More to learn in the short run, but more simplicity in the long run because you only have to learn one tool.

Web Clipper folk, time to find something more cutting edge to do at Evernote.com! Web Clipper’s product manager is the “Bill Clinton of Evernote” and resistance is futile. Bill will assimilate you.

Bottom Line for GTD people:

Install Evernote Web Clipper, and ignore Evernote Clearly.

bill meade

What is Evernote Web Clipper?

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Web Clipper is …

Evernote has a web page at https://evernote.com/webclipper/guide/#1 that shows you how Web Clipper works, and, what you can do with Web Clipper. I have not read Evernote’s entire web site, but it seems to me that Evernote is as meticulous about not mentioning GETTING THINGS DONE as David Allen is meticulous in avoiding mentioning electronic technology. The purpose of this post is to explore the roles Evernote Web Clipper can play in a GTD trusted system.

*Aside* David Allen is the master of the game of organizing. I yield to no one in admiration for the refined, focused, and effective system that Allen has made GTD.

But …

… if I were David Allen, I would be pushing a two “gateway” technology tools to catalyze GTD implementation. For example:

  • Dual-sided-single-pass-50-page-input-scanners. Currently the ScanSnap iX500 is the top rated scanner in customer satisfaction (based on Amazon revues). A professional scanner is a gateway technology because it allows you to get paper out of your face. My 94,000 page massive filing system took four long afternoons to import to computer.
  • Evernote. Because once you have all the atoms of your “might-have-a-next-action” converted to electrons, you need a way to Google your electrons to find documents as you need them. I wish that Evernote had competitors, but right now, there just are none.

Zooming Out …

There are three GTD universes that trusted systems need to interact with: atoms, bits universe (email, web pages), and images (physical stuff reduced to bits or images):

The reason we have headaches about all the stuff we have to do, is that all the objects in all three of these domains will live in our brain if we do not have a better way to manage them.  GTD is a better way to manage all the “stuff” objects in these three realms, but implementing GTD is hard.  Why is implementing GTD hard?

  1. Because we have to recognize all the stuff that we are carrying around in our subconscious. For example, how many projects do you have? Common answer “10 or 12” actual answer >300. Understanding how one is organized before GTD, is sure to overwhelm.
  2. Because to get all the objects in our subconscious out of minds, we have to take their real-world counter parts (atoms, bits, and images) and move them into a trusted system.
  3. Because we have to build a trusted system before we move anything.
  4. Because we are afraid we will “do it wrong” when building our trusted system.
  5. Because doing steps 1 through 3 is exhausting and it takes a pretty big investment to accomplish these steps. And, life does not stand still while doing steps 1-3.

What does this have to do with Evernote Web Clipper?

Glad you asked!!! Because Evernote Web Clipper is the principal means of moving important “bits stuff” from the world, into your Evernote database.

This image is an idealization of how the world should work to on-ramp stuff-with-next-actions (STNA) into an Evernote reference file system.

Q: What is Evernote Web Clipper?

A: The principal on-ramp to move bits from the world into your Evernote database.

Q: Why is this a big deal?

A: Because when you have captured the bits your subconscious is diligently not-forgetting, and your sub conscious sees that it can trust your system. Your brain will go through the-mother-of-all-defrags and you will reclaim massive quantities of now-empty memory slots to renew your creativity and amplify focus power.

In this analogy, why is a scanner so important? Because a scanner is an on-ramp for all your paper into your Evernote Database. And, once the atoms have been turned to bits and brought into Evernote, you can recycle the atoms and gain two physical degree of freedom over your work environment: (1) Elimination of clutter, and (2) Rearrangement freedom as you can CraigsListFree your file cabinets and take back tons of office space. And, you reclaim memory slots increasing creativity and amplifying focus power.

What about Web Clipper on tablets and Smart Phones? It appears that Evernote has not gotten there yet. So Evernote gets a Janus (my little marker for stuff that isn’t in Evernote yet, but I find does make it in over time) as I predict this will happen.

800px-Janus1Source: Wikipedia

I did find, however, Jonathan Mergy’s web site where he has a workaround to simulate Evernote Web Clipper for iPhones and iPads. I am an Android, so I have not tested this. But once you install Web Clipper and get accustomed to it, you instinctively reach to click on Web Clipper when you are using your phone or tablet.

bill meade

Appendix A: Basic How Tos:

To see several of the things Web Clipper can do:

  • Go to https://evernote.com/webclipper/guide/#1