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(Archived) Managing Projects and Tasks with EN


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I'm curious how others are using Evernote. I know EN lends itself to research and gathering lots of information from multiple sources. But I'm trying to also use it as my GTD Inbox and project manager.

How are you managing projects and tasks with Evernote? What combination of folders and tags are proving most useful?

Multiple notebooks? Do you use a notebook for each major project? Or lots of tags? Tags for each project? What about when a project is completed? Does this get moved to a different folder? Retagged?

Currently, I'm using Notebooks as big buckets (ex: 'Work') and all information related to that big bucket goes in there. This includes reference material, active projects, old projects, etc. I create a tag for each new project so I can quickly group everything related to that project. I'm a little nervous that I will soon be swimming in hundreds of tags, though.

I love that I can filter on Todo attributes (open and completed), so I could define an "active" project as an item with an incomplete todo.

I would love to hear other people's input on how they are managing projects and tasks - and even tips for research and reference material as well. I'm looking to use EN for everything.

Should there be a separate forum board strictly for use cases and user tips?

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Hi,

I am using Evernote for GTD. I am using a single notebook as I got fed up with being prompted for a notebook with each new note. I have a GTD tag and then nested in there I have my context tags @Home, @Work, etc I also have an Agendas tag and then have various Agenda tags nested inside that. Similarly I have a Checklists tag with the a tag for my individual checklists nested. I also then have a Projects tag, nested in there I have Home Projects and Work Projects and then a tag for each project.

I can see the potential for getting overwhelmed with tags but so far this setup is working quite well for me. I love the ability to tag a note with many items, for example something I can do @Home and @Computer gets both tags, if it is related to a project I can also tag it with the project and then once it has been completed I can add some notes, remove the context tags, leaving the project tag so it becomes a reference item in that project.

So far I have not found a real need for different notebooks with this approach in fact I found it to be frustrating sometimes when my searches on a tag were coming up with fewer items than I knew it should have because I had a notebook selected. Some @Calls items which I could have been doing were not showing up because I had created them in a different notebook. To me the context is @Calls regardless of whether they are in the work or personal notebook.

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I am an early adopter and longtime user of EN 2.2, and I still flip back and forth in my own mind about whether I want a given database (Notebook in EN3?) to be fairly "flat" and wide, or more specific and narrow. The net/net on that for me is to swing both ways, depending {grin}

I have a couple of very fat, flat primary DBs (lets call them Work and Home, since that's what they represent), and it is very useful to have a big open InBox attached to each. But rather than flip around back and forth in that one big bin for everything all the time, I also have several slimmer, smaller DBs for selected collections or projects.

The beauty of EN to me has always been its elasticity. I can be more linear or more fluid and have it work wonderfully either way.

Carly

(who still hasn't tried EN3 but is here learning more about it)

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Hi,

I am using Evernote for GTD. I am using a single notebook as I got fed up with being prompted for a notebook with each new note. I have a GTD tag and then nested in there I have my context tags @Home, @Work, etc I also have an Agendas tag and then have various Agenda tags nested inside that. Similarly I have a Checklists tag with the a tag for my individual checklists nested. I also then have a Projects tag, nested in there I have Home Projects and Work Projects and then a tag for each project.

I can see the potential for getting overwhelmed with tags but so far this setup is working quite well for me. I love the ability to tag a note with many items, for example something I can do @Home and @Computer gets both tags, if it is related to a project I can also tag it with the project and then once it has been completed I can add some notes, remove the context tags, leaving the project tag so it becomes a reference item in that project.

So far I have not found a real need for different notebooks with this approach in fact I found it to be frustrating sometimes when my searches on a tag were coming up with fewer items than I knew it should have because I had a notebook selected. Some @Calls items which I could have been doing were not showing up because I had created them in a different notebook. To me the context is @Calls regardless of whether they are in the work or personal notebook.

Thanks for this response. You got me thinking...

I joined the fray in the Subnotes discussion. Your system intrigues me. I was thinking about using very few notebooks - perhaps one for active projects, and another for completed projects + all reference material - and using tags for all organization. (inheritance with tags would help a lot!)

Have you seen any kind of performance hit with using one big notebook?

Also, are you actually using '@Calls' as a tag? I had to switch to using underscores (_Calls, etc.) because search doesn't find special characters. Without the underscore, my Calls search was showing every instance of the word "call" - ignoring the '@' symbol.

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Hi,

No, I have not noticed a performance hit. I don't have a huge amount of notes though, just a few hundred. As for the @Calls tag, yes I actually use the @ sign but I don't search for notes when I am looking for actions in a particular context. I just click on the @Calls (on the tag list) when I want to make a call and then all my @Calls actions appear. I find that when I am searching for something it isn't the context I am searching for but a particular piece of information within the note. I have no issues with the @ and search, in fact, I didn't even know EN doesn't see it when searching.

The issue I found with different notebooks was one where I found my workflow slowing down when I had to decide which notebook to put an action in that wasn't related to a particular project. For example, if I had to call my insurance agent for a quote on something I would tag it with my @Calls, @Home, @Work context tags because I could do that action in all those contexts (I work at home on a Friday, and I have to call him in business house so that explains the @Home and @Work tags). What I found was that when I created the note I was presented with the dialog asking me for a notebook and I found myself pausing to decide which notebook to put it in. Calling my insurance agent is probably a Home (or Personal) notebook item but I can complete the action at work. If I put it in my Home notebook and then a couple of days later when at work with my work notebook open that item would not show up when I click on my @Calls tag because it was in the other notebook.

Hopefully that explanation is clear, but basically I found myself having to click more and make more decisions when creating and looking for items when in a particular context.

Russ

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I've found the documentation that's within Evernote (and on the website) to be fairly light, especially when it comes to search expressions. Fortunately, there is a great article on all of the Evernote search terms in the API documents. It's available here: http://www.evernote.com/about/developer ... c200272595.

I just read GTD a couple weeks ago, and have been trying to figure out a good way to use Evernote for managing my activities ever since. Looking on David Allen's website, I found that a number of people recommend using Omnifocus for managing activities, and using Evernote for general reference. I don't like this approach for a few reasons: 1. it's one more application to use and purchase, 2. omnifocus is only available on the mac (I use a PC at work), and 3. though it too has an iphone app, there's no robust web application like evernote.

So I've been playing around with how to use Evernote for both activities and reference files. I started with notebooks for NextAction, WaitingFor, Maybe/Someday, for each of my major projects, and for each of the key people with whom I work (my staff, my boss, etc.). I created tags for people also, as well as different contexts (Home, Work, Computer). I found this to be a bit unwieldy, so I think I'm back to how everyone else on this message thread seems to be using it. I have 5 notebooks - NextAction, WaitingFor, Maybe/Someday,Personal Projects, and Work Projects. I'm using tags for everything - I've got people, project, and context tags. I still have a ton of notebooks, but I'm using them just for reference and archival now.

The one thing that I did differently is that I created saved searches. This is so that I can filter my personal and work activities (since they co-mingle in some of the folders). I also just learned today that you can create checkboxes by typing Ctrl-Shift-C (and if you hit Ctrl-Enter, it'll create one on the next line automatically). This is huge, because now I can create a saved search that shows me projects with open actions (see the search manual, but it's "todo:false" to show notes with unchecked boxes).

A couple comments on functionality:

- It's a bummer that when you create a hierarchical tag, that there's no way to show all notes within the tag's hierarchy. What I mean by that is if I create a tag for my "Errands" context that has both a groceries and a hardware sub-tag, I can't just search on Errands and have it show me everything. I have to explicitly call out each sub-tag in the search expression.

- The Mac version auto-fills the tag as you type. This is very convenient because each note can have 3-5 (or more) tags on it. Unfortunately, the PC version does not do this, so it's a bit slower, though the fact that you can drag tags and notes onto each other makes it a bit less painful.

Would love to hear more about how others are using Evernote with GTD.

- raj madhure

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A couple of months ago, I switched to EN on Mac, web, and iPhone for project and task management. All notes remain in one notebook, so organization is accomplished with tags. Every note has at least 2 tags: a project tag, and a status tag. I used to apply context tags, but could not come up with contexts that were helpful. Projects usually last at least several weeks, and I tend to have about a dozen active at any given time. I use the following status tags: now, next, waiting, deferred, someday, reference, done.

I'm considering the following refinements:

- Start archiving inactive notes in a separate notebook (for now, clutter is reduced by including -tag:done in searches)

- Find contexts that make sense for me

- If the "subject date" feature is added to the clients that I use, then time-critical notes will be exclusively managed in Evernote. Currently, I enter an event in my calendar for this purpose.

Tom

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My hybrid of Covey/GTD from a couple of months ago:

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=8043#p30579

However, to enhance the power of Saved Searches, I'm tagging my projects with 3-4 tags i.e.

Podcast Consultant (Notebook) - Episode #1 (Note), tagged with "funny", "podcast", "project"

Therapist (Notebook) - Client #1 (Note), tagged with "susan", "therapy", "project"

For "waiting on" items, I remove the "project" tag, and add "waiting on" tag.

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  • 2 weeks later...
I am missing something. instead of using ordinary tags, you are using the @ symbol for some search function? Is there a place where I can read up on this? Or can someone explain what you are talking about?

I don't actually search for my context tags, I click on them in the tag tree on the left panel in the application. I was not aware the @ sign could not be searched for but this has not been a problem for me as I click on the tag rather than search for it.

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  • 1 month later...

Okay, don't get me wrong. I love Evernote. Great, great app. But I run a large IT organization and have many projects running at the same time. I couldn't figure out a really good way to build the GTD processes into Evernote to help me manage these in a straightforward manner. I looked at how everyone else was doing it and created my own modified tagging system, and used check lists to track tasks within a project. But it just doesn't seem quite natural.

I was really hesitant to use Omnifocus as I have a Mac at home and a PC at work, so I had to dig an old Mac out of storage in the office to make it work. Not the best, but much better.

I'm still using Evernote for my filing. It's especially nice for storing receipts and stuff. I like being able to launch files from inside Evernote, edit and save them, and have Evernote automatically update with the latest copy. Very nice (compared to the atrocious Lotus Notes where I always seem to accidentally edit the copy of a file that's in the temp folder and then get's lost when I just hit Ctrl-S to save).

If Evernote comes out with some stronger built-in GTD/task management functionality, I will gladly switch back. I liked having one system for everything.

raj

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  • Level 5*

I also found that although EN is great for managing and storing information, it makes a poor GTD task manager. In fairness, that is not EN's focus. I tried various ways to make it work for me, but couldn't. It always felt like I was trying to force a square peg into a round hole. No one application can be everything to everyone, so after some searching, I settled on My Life Organized as my task manager of choice. I still heavily rely on EN for notes and information storage but for the strict business of task management, MLO better meets my GTD needs. My dilemma is where to put notes associated with tasks. MLO has a note field and for now I put task specific information there. If EN implements note linking in the future where I can insert an EN link into the note field of MLO, then I will have the best of both worlds, task management with MLO and all my note content within EN.

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