An Unusual Request

[Bill Myers 458]

Hi. I realize this is a thoroughly inappropriate use of this forum, but rather than complain bitterly about Evernote's feature set, stability, or pricing; or call for all Bending Spoons employees to be incarcerated; or discuss last year's bowling scores; I would like to ask other users for help. Specifically, I'm interested in learning how people use Evernote to manage their work.

I'll further ignore all that is good and decent by trying to provide some helpful context about me and my use case. I have ADHD and I find that the more complex my systems are, the more I have trouble managing them. Some people speak of "curating" their notes or using "taxonomies" but I find that the more I have to remember the more apt I am to miss a step. I recent culled roughly 2,500 notes down to about 170 that I want to keep. I expect to grow that over time, now that I have a better idea of what I might want to use Evernote for.

I currently have three notebook stacks: one for checklists, one for project support, and one for reference. I have multiple notebooks within each stack, which is primarily how I narrow down what I want to find. I don't currently feel I have a use for tags but am open to suggestions (which I realize is a horrible thing to admit when, by forum rules, I should take the position that I know everything). My concern is that as I grow my collection of notes, I might outgrow this simple way of organizing things.

Furthermore, I am a practitioner of a life management system called Getting Things Done, or GTD. I use a tool called Nirvana to manage all of my action and projects lists and therefore have no desire to use Evernote tasks. I realize a lot of people are happy with tasks. I just don't think I fit the profile of the intended target user for that feature. (I understand that such neutral language about a feature I don't use has no place here. Clearly I ought to be saying that whoever came up with this awful tasks feature should burn for all eternity in the fires of hell, but I just don't feel that way. I am obviously an awful, awful person.)

Evernote is primarily the means by which I store any digital content that doesn't have a home elsewhere. I feel that email lives nicely in Gmail or Outlook, and both have search features that allow me to find what I need. I also find that for most documents, spreadsheets, and PDF files, storing them in folders in the Documents directory in Windows works fine for my needs. I use Evernote to store free-form notes, tables I create for simple needs, web clippings, and things like that. Although if someone can suggest a reason why using Evernote to do more could be useful, I'm all ears.

I was in sales until I lost my job at the end of February. I've been interviewing for sales jobs, but also am in the running for a sales support job that would involve being a subject matter expert at a SaaS provider, doing demos and providing expertise to salespeople, as well as training and technical support for customers. My hobbies include comic-book writing and illustration (I'm working on creating my own comic, and right now a lot of the preliminary story ideas, character bios, and story outlines live in a project folder in Evernote). I'm married. I have no children, but I have two greyhounds and three cats who mean the world to me. I don't know if that context helps but thought I'd provide it to further help people understand the kinds of things I need and want to manage.

I guess because I'm paying for an Evernote subscription (and I realize it takes some serious gall to be willing pay for the service) I'm wondering if I'm using it for all it's worth. Right now I don't use the Home screen in any way. I don't know if there's anything else I might be missing in terms of using the tool well.

Ultimately I realize I'm the only one who can decide how to use the tool to my satisfaction but I'd really love to hear other people's ideas and learn from them if anyone would care to share.

(And yes, I do realize that being a relatively happy paying customer means I have no place here. Clearly a lifetime of hard labor in a North Korean prison camp is too good for the likes of me. But if you all could see past my depravity and take pity on me, I'd really be grateful for people's suggestions.)

(I also apologize for the heaps of sarcasm. I'm kind of in a mood today, and partly this is just how I am. Hopefully I haven't turned away any people who might otherwise be inclined to help. I really am coming here in all humility, firmly believing that a lot of people here know a great deal more than I do and might have something to teach me. Thanks.)

[PinkElephant 8,174]

Some ideas ? Some ideas:

1) Notebooks vs. Tags is a never finishing discussion. There is one very simple difference: One (1) Note must be in one (1)  notebook at any time. Not in zero, not in 2 or more. This is a massive restriction, and this is typical for file systems we know from computers. It leads to people duplicating files (notes) to different folders (notebooks) just because they can’t decide where they belong.

Tags are the opposite: You don’t need to apply any, and you can apply many. They are independent from each other, but they can be used in conjunction for searches. „#Invoice“ will show all invoices, „#Open“ will show all notes with an open issue, but „#Invoice, #Open“ will show all open Invoices - which are hopefully far less than all invoices. When paid, you remove the single #Open tag, and you are done with invoice control. That’s why Tags play very well with GTD users.

2) In general keeping notes short is better than adding more to already long notes. You can link notes together, or create a Table of Content TOC for a group of notes belonging to an issue or a project. The beauty is again that it is non exclusive: Say you have several projects, and one note with budget information, relevant for all projects. You can put this single budget note into all project TOC notes, and access your budget from all projects.

Backlinking took this a huge step further: You can now open the budget note, and see in the backlinks directly to which projects (and other notes) it already has been linked. This is adding a lot of transparency, without a need for the user to do anything else. Link it, and the backlink will show itself.

3) What is a great use of notebooks is sharing. If you share single notes, you will quickly have a maze of shared notes. It will be difficult to control who has access, and to which information.

Enter shared notebooks: You share a notebook to one or more people. Everything you drop into the notebook is shared, everything you remove, the sharing stops. If you want to stop sharing at all (end of project, for example), you unshare the whole notebook. The only drawback of sharing by notebook is that you can’t create a link any more, and spread it. You always need to know who needs access, and share it in person.

Just a few ideas, hope you can make use of some ideas.

[gazumped 11,698]

Hmmn.  I'm a shameless notebook abuser these days - I used to have some emails redirected to my account so I'd always have a record of events,  keep all pictures from my camera,  OCR all documents,  copy some or all of web pages...  I built up to 60,000 notes with at one time most of those notes being in my default notebook.  I relied on searches (Evernote has a really good search feature,  and if you're not using it,  you should.  And the new version has 'filters' too to add or remove topics from your search results).  But I was never really sure that I could find everything that I needed - I'm getting on a bit and sometimes remembering what keywords would actually turn up the data I needed was... problematic.

So I shifted to using separate notebooks.  All my interactions with, and information on, everyone and everything from Amazon to Zeigarnik goes into a notebook with that name,  and the individual note titles are prefaced with the date in yyyymmdd format so a search on titles gives me a timeline and I can find out the state of my last Amazon purchase instantly (forinstance) by going to that notebook.  No searching involved.

I am also a (very loose) GTD aficionado,  in terms of getting things out of my head and into a note.  (Plus - see 'memory' above!)  So each new task is a note.  With Task entries and date(s) as appropriate.

My most recent thought is that everything - even an Amazon purchase - involves multiple notes.  At the very least there's my copy of the 'you bought it' page,  Amazon's acknowledgement,  the 'it's left the warehouse' email and the '7 doors away' stage.  Plus the delivery note.  And the User Guide.

I was either using note links or title keywords to join these things together,  or merging everything into one large email,  and trying to keep a 'parent note' - a Table of Contents listing for each transaction.  It was getting complicated,  and I was getting bogged down with all this documentation - again.

So now what I do is create a new mini-parent note for each task or transaction - including all my GTD things - and drag and drop all related email files, pictures and user guides into that note as files as things progress.  As I process each MP note I'll attach email files,  copy URLs,  and keep essential content - but delete stuff I now know I won't need.

That should stop my notes from spiralling out of control in either number or disk space.

-That was something of a high-level overview,  but it's something that works for me - though I haven't exactly documented it in full yet.  It probably sounds much more complicated than it needs to.  I do encourage you to decide on a system (any system) and try it out - you can't break anything,  and you won't really know what type of system best suits your needs until you start using one.  If it doesn't work - well I'm on Plan C or D now;  you can always change as you go on!

And despite what may have been your traumatic introduction to the Forums, us 'mature' users are always prepared to help someone out - just don't be a jerk,  and have a sense of humour and we'll all get along fine! 

Probably...  

See also:  Search overview  |  Tasks Overview  |  Filter your notes list  |  and,  it's a(nother) outlay but that nice Mr Steve Dotto has a full course on this sort of thing...  |  This however is free - Stacey Harmon's Evernote v10 Resource Centre

[Bill Myers 458]

13 minutes ago, gazumped said:

And despite what may have been your traumatic introduction to the Forums, us 'mature' users are always prepared to help someone out - just don't be a jerk,  and have a sense of humour and we'll all get along fine! 

Well, actually, I've been reading these forums for several years (actually, maybe more than a decade). You wouldn't recognize my name, I'm sure, because I've only posted very sporadically during that time.  I have to admit, back in the day I've posted about some unhappy experiences with Evernote but generally kept my cool. These days I just don't get very excited about these things. If I like something like Evernote I keep paying for it and if I don't I cancel my subscription and leave quietly. What's the point of doing much else?

I usually read "I hate Evernote posts" with a yawn and then move on. The other day, however, I saw someone had referred to Bending Spoons as a "greedy Italian mob" which set me off. (And it leads me to wonder, would that have made the old Evernote company a "greedy Silicon Valley venture-capital-backed mob"? Is that an actual mob? Would Evernote be the thing that made their criminal activity organized? Is it really a good idea to keep a record of criminal activity in a cloud-based application? So many questions.) So I posted multiple times with variations on the theme of wondering why anyone would get so all-fired-up angry about cloud-based note-taking software and particularly calling out someone for using an ethnic slur simply because they don't like Bending Spoons' new pricing. But I got that out of my system.

So... the tenor of these forums... nothing new to me. I realize the anti-Italian bit may have been a new low, but it's a difference of degree rather than kind and vituperation on these boards is hardly an isolated thing.

As for "don't be a jerk" -- well, *****. Too late. I already have been. Where in hell are moderators when you need them?

As for having "a sense of humor," I like to think I'm funny. When I was younger I used to stand-up comedy at open mic nights. I'm afraid 99 percent of the laughs I got were for the wrong reasons, though. 

Nevertheless I appreciate your response as well as @PinkElephant's. Rather than responding I'm digesting what I've read. But I greatly appreciate your input and look forward to any more I might receive.

[Bill Myers 458]

Huh. Based on what happened to my prior post, some naughty language is allowed here and some not (I think both words I used were PG-13 at worst, but one of them offended the anti-potty-talk algorithms). Boy, you just can't take me anywhere. Even virtually.

[PinkElephant 8,174]

Well, there is a forum code of conduct. If it is violated, it is enforced.

But on the other hand there is a need for a lively discussion, and that includes some emotions.

Finally we have the usual distribution of evaluations: 10% say „ridiculous“ while another 10% say „what’s up“, and the rest sticks in the middle. I agree, that mob-bing remark was pretty far off the expected behavior.

 

[gazumped 11,698]

8 minutes ago, Bill Myers said:

Where in hell are moderators when you need them?

Ouch.  You may notice I have an extra green badge on my profile,  and I have been known to inadvertently disappear some low comments.  Didn't see that one.

The Forum Nanny however is a software process and even I can't say anything bad an get away with it.

[Bill Myers 458]

6 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Ouch.  You may notice I have an extra green badge on my profile,  and I have been known to inadvertently disappear some low comments.  Didn't see that one.

Well, as an Evernote user I'm sure your moderator duties are on a volunteer basis. I would assume in addition to being a moderator you are a person with an outside life.

Also, when I wondered where the forum moderators were I was actually referring to my own self-deprecating jest about having been a jerk myself. As in -- why haven't you booted me out? I would hope in all seriousness I haven't been the sort of person you'd need to bounce out of here. 

[Bill Myers 458]

11 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Finally we have the usual distribution of evaluations: 10% say „ridiculous“ while another 10% say „what’s up“, and the rest sticks in the middle. I agree, that mob-bing remark was pretty far off the expected behavior.

Well, as I said, it was on the extreme end of things but not truly an isolated incident. I've seen plenty of comments that were unnecessarily verbally abusive but probably just skirted the line without going over it. Nevertheless, I don't want to position myself as a self-appointed civility policeman. I said what I said in the other threads and stand by it, but it's time to move on. I'm actually much more interested in learning more about Evernote now that I've settled on it as my main digital tool for content that wouldn't have a home elsewhere. I have a natural curiosity and am wondering what I might be able to do with it that I haven't yet thought of. Hence my original post.

[Bill Myers 458]

BTW, @gazumped, in addition to noticing your little green badge I've also noticed you're a level 5 and I'm a level 3. Which means... I'm two less than you. I'm not sure what else that implies or how I would level up. Or what I would receive by way of reward if I did. Free French fries at one of the better U.S. fast food chains? Please say it's fries, man. I love me some fries.

[DTLow 5,736]

4 hours ago, Bill Myers said:

I don't currently feel I have a use for tags but am open to suggestions

I'm a tagger    
Historically, tags have been Evernotes primary organization tool    
with notebooks used to identify notes for sharing, offline, local (legacy), ...     

For me, the most important benefit is that multiple tags can be assigned to a note   
Notes are restricted to a single notebook assignment   
  
fwiw  I don't use nested tags    
I reflect hierarchy in tag names for example:    
Budget  
Budget-Housing  
Budget-HousingRent  
Budget-HousingUtilites  

>I recent culled roughly 2,500 notes down to about 170

I have over 20,000 notes   
That number is well short of causing any issues,   
and "culling" is not a priority for me

[Bill Myers 458]

3 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Historically, tags have been Evernotes primary organization tool

I understand the tags vs. notebooks debate has been going on since time immemorial, and that online discussions, mud wrestling matches and even one duel with old-fashioned dueling pistols failed to settle it. My issue with tagging was that at one time I tagged the heck (I'm trying not to upset the anti-potty-talk algorithms any further) out of things with tags that just didn't mean a lot to me, creating a mess of little value. So I've fallen in with the notebook crowd despite their record of juvenile delinquency (a thing I may have just made up). I'm open to tags and understand the concept but I'm not sure I yet have use case for them. Nevertheless I'm open to learning which is why I've asked for input.

[Mike P 2,667]

6 hours ago, Bill Myers said:

I'm open to tags and understand the concept but I'm not sure I yet have use case for them. Nevertheless I'm open to learning which is why I've asked for input.

I think if you are disciplined, and don't just make up tags without much thought, you can use them very much like notebooks. I realise tags vs notebooks is a very personal thing and I am not criticising anybody who wants to use notebooks rather than tags.

I have only a few notebooks. One is my inbox (stuff yet to be filed), my main notebook and some shared notebooks. I then have hundreds of tags in a well organised hierarchy within 7 top level tags. The main advantage of tags for me are:

• I can easily find things about a topic whether it has been shared or not
• I can classify things with more than one tag
  • Useful if you don't know which category to put it in or it includes many
  • means that a note about local history can be classified as both local and history rather than local-history which means more opportunities to find it
• I can add meta data tags to the note. e.g. that it is a webclip of a tutorial (+tutorial) or is important. Therefore easy to find notes about a topic which meet some other criteria (e.g. it's important)
• Infinite (I think) hierarchy of tag levels

[gazumped 11,698]

8 hours ago, Bill Myers said:

I'm two less than you. I'm not sure what else that implies or how I would level up.

Well,  not to boast,  but I posted here roughly 34,000 times more than you (so far) and got 'liked' (that little heart thing down in the right corner) for about 9,500 of them -although to be fair some of those are probably the squiggly face ones that mean WTF rather than 'thanks'.  So I guess the way to narrow the gap is to post lots with the intention at least of helping people.  My excuse is that from time to time someone else will post something which makes me go "Doh!!" and realise that I really didn't know that specific trick despite using Evernote for 15 years now. 

Sorry to shatter the illusion,  but French fries have not been a part of that (or actually French) at any stage.

As to Notebooks -vs- Tags,  we're a broad (those fries again) church.  I started out enthusiastically tagging and got to over 1,000 which included <bank> <banks> <bankers> <banking> - but even when I was much more careful about assignments I still got duplicates and alternatives.  That memory thing I guess.  Now I still tag,  but I mainly add the name of the notebook holding the note as a doublecheck in case I move it by accident.

My notebooks silos do have one drawback - if Elon works at SpaceX and Tesla,  do I file my emails and notes regarding him under E, M, S or T? - Well,  I'll pick one (and try to be consistent with that choice so all the data is in one place) but any notes will have all of those tags so that I'll find them in any related search.  Not to strain your brain but I also subscribe to third-party app Filterize to automatically tag clips and emails when they arrive in my default folder - means the allocation is more consistent and accurate than I would be - and I reserve another tag for notes that I manually allocated so that the Filterizebot doesn't mess with any of my inspired work.

As I said before,  one size doesn't fit all in this case - your personality (you're lucky enough to have one),  your tech skills and your actual needs will be different to everyone else.  My solutions may not apply to you at all - it's just something to maybe consider.

Regarding "curation" - in a former life I was lucky enough (not) to run some big commercial databases and I learned early on that nothing is fixed - details change,  accidents happen, new processes mean messing with formats...  there's no such thing as 'file and forget' - you're always finding things to correct or tweak - or you're probably doing it wrong.

[Bill Myers 458]

3 hours ago, gazumped said:

So I guess the way to narrow the gap is to post lots with the intention at least of helping people.

I forgot that sarcasm and humor don't often come across in a format like this. I was just joking about not understanding how the "LVL" works. And I didn't mean to show any disrespect towards you or anyone else who has spent a lot of time here helping others. I don't aspire to "leveling up" nor do I see it as a competition. The only thing I aspire to here is to learn from others (that's my primary goal), help if I can, and try to be a good forum member.

3 hours ago, gazumped said:

Sorry to shatter the illusion,  but French fries have not been a part of that (or actually French) at any stage.

WHAT? No fries? That's it. I'm outta here.

3 hours ago, gazumped said:

your personality (you're lucky enough to have one)

BUT -- is it a good one or does it represent a never-before-identified disorder? A team of Viennese psychiatrists is still trying to sort that out.

[Bill Myers 458]

So... I'm digesting everyone's comments and I'm really appreciative of them. I think the issue for me is that Evernote's business model is to get users to do all of their work in Evernote to the maximum extent possible. As an avid GTD practitioner, I'm not going to stop using Nirvana for managing my actions and projects because it does that really well and I like it. I've used Evernote as my list manager before and it didn't work well for me.

I also saw that @DTLow uses Evernote somehow for budgeting. I use a SaaS solution called You Need A Budget and again, that works super well for me. I see no reason to try to move that function into Evernote.

I think others here have a more expansive vision for what Evernote can do for them, and also like to collect and save more than I do at the moment. But I am also feeling very strongly that my "just create notebooks and stick stuff in them" strategy is something I could very easily outgrow. Things could get hard to find. I know Evernote has a great search feature -- I use it liberally -- so that helps. But I could see a use for tags.

I am also wrestling with whether to start using Evernote to manage documents like Word files and Excel spreadsheets. There are some advantages and disadvantages to doing so. My biggest concern is my uncertainty about the Bending Spoons acquisition of the product. I certainly hope they have the best of success with it but none of us know what the future may hold. If the product goes belly up someday, I'd hate to have a mess where I'd need to figure out how to find and get critical, irreplaceable documents out of Evernote and into some other system.

Still, I don't want any of this to be construed as attempting to argue with people about their advice. I asked for suggestions because I am open to learning, and this has been a great thread so far (at least in my estimation). Moreover I hope it's worth others' time to read as well. I tend to think discussions about how to utilize Evernote are a good, productive use of a forum like this. And again I thank everyone to for their help and look forward to additional comments if any are forthcoming.

[DTLow 5,736]

6 hours ago, Bill Myers said:

I use a SaaS solution called You Need A Budget and again, that works super well for me. I see no reason to try to move that function into Evernote.

Evernote Legacy was my Digital File Cabinet
All my financial transactions were stored/organized as notes   
tagged as required.    

For budget/expense reporting, I export the data to a spreadsheet (Apple Numbers)
YNAB is a great product, but I like the diy flexibility of a spreadsheet with integrated scripting (Applescript)

[s2sailor 2,237]

4 hours ago, Bill Myers said:

I use a SaaS solution called You Need A Budget and again, that works super well for me. I see no reason to try to move that function into Evernote.

I’m an avid YNAB user as well.  I’ve seen some very creative uses of Evernote but there is no way the functionality of YNAB could be shoehorned into Evernote.  Two very completely different beasts.

[gazumped 11,698]

Another vote for YNAB here too...

[Bill Myers 458]

Yeah, I don't need Evernote to be all things to me. YNAB is the right tool for my finances. Nirvana is the right tool for GTD lists.

On the other hand, Nirvana doesn't handle project plans well. At best projects have a note field that allows for plain text and the creation of very basic checkboxes (athough creating and using the checkboxes is a bit of a kludge). Nirvana has been promising the capability to add attachments for years but still no word on when or if that might happen. Reading these posts it occurs to me that projects that need more complex planning and/or digital support materials would be best handled in Evernote. The ability to create TOC lists and the backlinks feature would make that pretty easy.

Ultimately I'm noticing two things here. First, some people feel the need to collect and save a lot more content than I do. For instance, when I order something from Amazon I simply note what's coming in a "waiting for" item in Nirvana and assign a due date so I'll know when it should arrive. If it doesn't and I haven't received an email about it I contact Amazon. Letting them manage my order history is good enough for me. I'm not saying @gazumped is doing it wrong. We're just different.

Second, some of you are a bit more (or a lot more) technologically adept than me. @DTLow likes the flexibility of using Apple Numbers and custom scripting to handle budgeting. I am not a software developer (although, in fairness, I don't know if @DTLow is either) and have no interest in learning scripting even on an amateur basis. I am more tech-literate than the average person but nevertheless I want software that just works. I don't want to have to go under the hood or spend a lot of time configuring things.

Still, even though our desires and use cases are different I am learning a lot here. I do think I could be using Evernote for more than I am, and maybe using it better than I am right now. I don't need it to be everything, I just need it to be good at the things I want it to do.

I know there are a lot of people expressing that they have or will be leaving Evernote. All I can says is that despite the ups and downs since I started using it (maybe 2012 or so, I can't remember) I haven't found anything else that makes me comfortable. I think OneNote is more stable and I already pay for it as part of my Office365 subscription, but I don't love the interface, the search tool isn't as robust, I don't think it handles web clipping as well, and maybe things have changed but when I tried to use it years ago setting up the sync was a pain. I downloaded Obsidian and played with it but found it un-intuitive in some respects and I'm just not willing to invest the time to learn it.

Yes, Evernote has its issues. But what I like about it, I really like. That's why I hope Bending Spoons does well with it. If Evernote folds, I can find something else that can work for me. But I'd prefer not to.

 

[gazumped 11,698]

2 minutes ago, Bill Myers said:

Yes, Evernote has its issues. But what I like about it, I really like. That's why I hope Bending Spoons does well with it. If Evernote folds, I can find something else that can work for me. But I'd prefer not to.

So say we all... 🙂

[Bill Myers 458]

1 hour ago, gazumped said:

So say we all... 🙂

Is that a Battlestar Galactica reference? Please say it's a Battlestar Galactica reference.

[Bill Myers 458]

Hey, circling back to thank everyone who chimed in. I picked up some good tips. I started using tags for organizing and found I liked that better. I'm looking forward to getting to know Evernote better, and happy to know there's a supportive forum I can turn to for help.

[xaxodi 0]

i am also looking for batter notes app for my Tesla Homes Guide Blog, to make thing batter and smooth. everynote is very good but slow.

[gazumped 11,698]

On 1/27/2024 at 6:42 AM, xaxodi said:

i am also looking for batter notes app for my Tesla Homes Guide Blog, to make thing batter and smooth. everynote is very good but slow.

Hi.  Please start your own thread rather than tagging on to someone else's query.  Please also include what device / OS / Evernote version you are currently using.