This post is the text of an email I wrote to a restartgtd.com reader who asked about Evernote.
/begin email
I’ve written a lot of posts on Evernote:
The biggies with Evernote are:
- Install Evernote app on your computer
- Get Evernote app connected to your Evernote account.
- Install Clearly and Web Clipper in your browsers on all platforms.
- In each web browser, Immediately clip a (any)pagetoEvernote
- From clearly
- From web clipper
- You have to authenticate via Clearly and Web Clipper separately. Stupid but necessary.
- This on-ramps all your net-found materials to Evernote.
- In each web browser, Immediately clip a (any)pagetoEvernote
- Force yourself to use Clearly and Web Clipper religiously for 1 day, capturing notes that “might be useful … ever.”
- Then useClearly and Web Clipper when you get a *twinge* that you might want to find the web article again.
- Default to using Clearly and Web Clipper too much. Or …
- When you catch yourselflookinginEvernote for something, and you figure out that the document isnotinEvernote. Put a copy of thedocumentinEvernote so your reality is consistent with your expectations.
- Example: Somewhere I read that “Nipper” the RCA dog was listening to a recording of his (deceased) master’s voice in the famous painting.
- I said to someone “I can give you a link to the page from my Evernote account.” And then I went into Evernote just to check myself. The article was not there, so, I found the information on the web, and snipped the information into Evernote with Web Clipper, and now I can share it on demand.
- The more I use Evernote, the more “stuff” that goes into Evernote. I use Evernote as the ultimate single A to Z reference file ala David Allen GTD
- Example: Somewhere I read that “Nipper” the RCA dog was listening to a recording of his (deceased) master’s voice in the famous painting.
- Get a Scansnap ix500 ($405 today)
- In addition to being an Evernote fanboi I’m also a ScanSnap fanboi. There are quite a few ScanSnap articlesinRestartGTD.
- ScanSnaps are optimally valuable ingesting paper into Evernote. I converted 94,000 pages of reference files into Evernote in 4 afternoons.
- But after you have your data into Evernote, you won’t regret the money spent on the scansnap. My scanning backlog is perpetually zero as I can scan anything in a minute.
- Buy the best, only cry once.
- In addition to being an Evernote fanboi I’m also a ScanSnap fanboi. There are quite a few ScanSnap articlesinRestartGTD.
- Triage all your paper into:
- To scan. Then scan and put in …
- Recycle
- Precious can’t throw out, scan and file for posterity
- Don’t worry about Evernote tags
- I useEvernote tags only on documents that are hard to find using my default “what two words will only be on the document I’m looking for” query.
- After I eventually find the article I set the tag to whatever concept I was trying to find. And then I also add the concept name into the note (belts+suspenders strategy).
- I useEvernote tags only on documents that are hard to find using my default “what two words will only be on the document I’m looking for” query.
- Play with Evernote’s notebooks (I think of these as folders). For the most part notebooks hold two species of documents for me:
- Projects
- I gather all the reference materials for a big project into a notebook that I can share with people working on the projects. I out-read pretty much everyone on a project, so I’m a natural keeper of the reference materials.
- Reference files
- I have a general “Articles” notebook (folder) for PDFs of articles and captured via Clearly/Web Clipper HTML articles. Motto: “I read therefore I am” so I’ve got approximately 15,900 documents in Evernote.
- I also have a “Data Science” notebook where I put technical documents on R, ggplot2, Azure Machine Learning, etc. that I work with.
- I also have a “family” notebook with sub notebooks for reference documents for each family member.
- Projects
- Use Evernote’s shortcut feature for folders.
- My most used shortcut is a notebook I call “cribsheets” which are notes with the distilled essence of stuff that is important to me. For example, Introduction to R, Excel commands I can’t remember, Introduction to Azure Machine Learning for data scientists, what Neal Analytics is looking for in new hires, etc.
- Sub idea: I use notesharinginEvernote quite a bit. This is particularly valuable to me as I can edit the note and not have to notify people of the changes.
- Right click on the note to “copy shared link” and then email the person the link.
- Sub idea: I use notesharinginEvernote quite a bit. This is particularly valuable to me as I can edit the note and not have to notify people of the changes.
- But I also add notebooks for hot projects to my shortcuts, and that saves a lot of steps in finding and filing
- My most used shortcut is a notebook I call “cribsheets” which are notes with the distilled essence of stuff that is important to me. For example, Introduction to R, Excel commands I can’t remember, Introduction to Azure Machine Learning for data scientists, what Neal Analytics is looking for in new hires, etc.
- Use OneNote to process a project into tasks.
- OneNote allows you to re-arrange scanned 3×5 cards in a note. Evernote does not allow re-arranging of graphics within a note. *Note* readers, correct me if I’m missing something about Evernote here.
- OneNote and Evernote are complements, not substitutes. I work a lot with Microsoft people, and they just don’t “get” OneNote vs. Evernote. Competitive instincts rear up instantly, and die hard in the face of data.
- I find OneNote to be superior for decomposing a project into next actions. But, I’m biased by my brain’s refusal to use only 1 electronic system.
- Use Evernote for reference filing only.
- Even my “Articles” and “Project” folders are just reference filing.
- I use Evernote on both Mac and Windows 10 on my Macbook Pro and iMac. I find it easiest to have my Evernote archives kept separately … even though it sucks to have redundant data. It sucks but works flawlessly.
Does this help? Ask again if not!
Bill Meade
My system is all tags-based. I have a ‘Inbox’ notebook for notes coming in, then once they’re tagged they go to a Main notebook, or a business notebook. Then I have a set of @ tags like @Errand, @Phone, @Home etc for context. I have the bulk of my tags as reference tags so they all start with Ref, e.g. Ref Receipt, Ref School. Then for projects I start them with a dot. e.g. .Cruise 2017, .Tax 16/17 (the tax one I also have a Ref Tax 16/17 because I might want to refer back to previous tax years’ notes. Project’s that are done get prefix with ‘Done’.
Then the tag hierarchy helps also. All context tags are under a parent ‘Context’ tag. Project tags are under a parent ‘Projects’ tag which has children ‘Active’ and ‘Inactive’. So all current projects are placed under the Projects > Active node.
And that’s about it. I’ve written some more about my system at http://derekgillett.com/paperless.
Why both Web Clipper and Clearly? (This question could belong on http://restartgtd.com/evernote-clearly-vs-evernote-web-clipper-a-quick-comparison/ )
It seems like Web Clipper is more fully-featured, and the three things that it doesn’t do are of little use (at least for me, for now).
Both Web Clipper and Clearly because neither add-in alone is sufficient.
* Clearly often strips too much out of a web page. In particular on R blogs where the programming steps get uglified beyond comprehension.
* Web Clipper often leaves the dialog box open over the content on the page that I want to highlight. So then I shift to web clipper.
* I use Clearly more frequently than Web Clipper, because I most frequently want to strip a lot of extraneous flash from the page and have the page in my chosen format (extra large serif text).
Try using just web clipper. If you don’t notice that it isn’t what you want, no need for Clearly.
bill