Bill Myers

Thank you for your answer. Between your response, the lack of other responses, and my own research failing to turn up anything, I feel pretty confident this falls under the category of "it is what it is." I have no plans to leave Evernote, so if they do get the Outlook integration working that will be icing on the cake. I did see that the Outlook piece was in beta, so I requested to be an Evernote beta tester in hopes I could get a crack at that. Anyway, no matter what happens, life moves on. Couldn't hurt to ask, though. Thanks again, @agsteele.

Not to belabor this further, but I couldn't stop obsessing about @ianfm's suggested Evernote/GTD setup and after a little more experimentation, I've decided to take the plunge. I am implementing @ianfm's suggestions pretty much to the letter, with maybe a couple-few tweaks of my own. And... I actually like this setup. Keeping everything in Evernote has a lot to recommend it. Sometimes I'm a little slow and stubborn when it comes to embracing change. Still, it's nice to have the Evernote Hive Mind help me along with that.

Hi, all. I took a job a couple months ago that requires me to use the company's Office 365 calendar. It's important for my calendar to be up-to-date so that colleagues, clients and prospects (I'm a salesperson) can schedule time with me. Our Outlook calendars also sync with the calendar feature in an app called ConnectWise, and sometimes colleagues need to be able to schedule time with me in ConnectWise rather than through Outlook. I've learned that the only way my personal appointments get blocked off in both calendars is if I have all of those appointments entered into my Outlook calendar. I've tried other solutions, such as subscribing to my Google calendar through Outlook, and none have worked. So I enter my personal appointments into Outlook and mark them "private" so that the details don't show up in ConnectWise. The company promises that no one at the company will read someone's private calendar information, and I have every confidence that that's the case. I'm only giving this level of detail to hopefully stave off any lectures about the wisdom of putting personal calendar items on the corporate calendar. It's a necessity for me, and a risk I take willingly. Anyway, I love the Google calendar integration with Evernote, so today I found a way to sync my Office 365 calendar with Google. But -- any events marked "private" simply show up in the Evernote calendar widget as "Busy." No details. Which makes the calendar integration kind of useless for me. I did some web research and couldn't find a solution. Has anyone else dealt with this? Is there a way to have the details of private calendar items show in Evernote? After all, they're my calendar items and I consent to letting Evernote show them to me. I trust myself not to abuse my own information. Thanks in advance.

I just find it funny that so many in this forum insist that Bending Spoons' only path to making Evernote profitable is to give away the service with very few restrictions. It reminds me of the Underpants Gnomes from South Park, whose business plan was as follows: Phase One: Collect underpants! Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Profit!

I noticed I could do that. It's just a question of whether it's something I'm willing to deal with. And it's not worth discussing, because Evernote isn't going to bend over backwards to accommodate all my likes and dislikes. Evernote tasks are something I want to use or they aren't. But it was sure nice of fellow users to take the time to help.

I posted another comment that I deleted because it was really snotty and contributed nothing of value. People can express whatever opinions the forum moderators deem within bounds. I don't have to like it. I posted another thread where I asked a question about GTD and some nice people chimed in with answers. I learned a few things. That was nice. Whereas tilting at windmills like this is exhausting. And not a role anyone needs me to fill.

I'm in sales and I can tell you from both personal experience and familiarity with scientific research that giving away a generous amount for free does not lead most customers to love you so much that they'll subsequently buy from you. It leads most people to feel entitled to the freebie, and to get angry if you take it away. Maybe your customers are different, but Bending Spoons would be wise to focus on the big picture. I'd say they can get enough of a taste to decide whether they want to sign up for a monthly subscription. They can cancel after one month if they don't like it. If that's enough to break their bank, I think they have bigger problems than Evernote's pricing. (That's not a judgment. I've been in financial dire straits before.) I don't know how often you turn around, but the most recent price increase is the first in several years. As @gazumped pointed out, restricting freebies isn't a price increase. No money leaves your pocket.

I tried to implement @ianfm's system. I discovered that task names don't wrap to a second line in the tasks view on the iPhone, unless I'm missing something. Does anyone know if there is a setting to change this? I couldn't find it. I know it may seem minor to some. But I can't write all of my tasks in just three or four words, and being able to see what I need to see on my iPhone at a glance is important to me. It there's no workaround to this, no big deal. I lived this long without Evernote tasks, I think I'll continue to live if they're not for me.

Fortunately for me, I am. I just haven't used the scratchpad extensively, so that perk escaped my notice. I've been ramping up my usage of Evernote gradually over the last few months. And picking up tips and tricks like this is my main reason for using the forum.

I totally forgot about the Tasks Widget, probably because I haven't used tasks up to this point. So I'm glad you said something! Having tasks and calendar side-by-side would be pretty cool! Also, I didn't know you could pin more than one scratchpad widget! I am so glad I posted my question. As much as it would be a PITA to copy all of my lists from Nirvana to Evernote, I could see a big benefit to putting everything in one place. Nirvana may have more functionality than Evernote tasks, but everything Evernote puts at your fingertips may outweigh that. Hm. I may have a nerdy project to work on for a few days. I love nerdy projects. I am so nerdy.

That's probably good advice. For better or worse, though, I'm more of a "leap before I look" kinda guy. 🤣 Honestly, based on the system you described and my little tests, I think I have it all pretty much worked on in my head how it would be implemented. And I can't think of any gaps. Also, I'm not sure if you thought I might be abandoning Evernote, but I definitely am not. Even if I decide to stick with Nirvana for list management, I use Evernote for so many other things it would be hard to unhook from it. And I don't want to. It's a little off-topic -- although I don't know how much of a sin that is given that I'm the OP -- but I love the Evernote Home screen. I don't use it nearly as cleverly as some, but I love having checklists on my home screen that power everything from planning my day first thing in the morning to keeping certain aspects of my life on-track throughout the day. It may not be fashionable to be pro-Evernote, but I've never been known to be fashionable. I'm Team Evernote.

@ianfm, I've been thinking a lot about your system over the past couple of days. After some initial resistance, I played around with your approach in Evernote today and I have to say... you have come up with a really elegant solution for using Evernote tasks for GTD. It's easy to set up, it's easy to update, and it leverages all of the advantages of Evernote. I am not sure if I am willing to devote the time to move all of my lists from Nirvana to Evernote, but I'm really tempted. I do see a lot of advantages as using Evernote as my "one ring to rule them all" for productivity. Thanks for sharing your system. You've helped me a lot and I appreciate it.

I'd like to apologize for my last couple of posts. And to apologize very directly to @Dave Green and @PinkElephant. I don't like to make excuses but something stressful happened at work this afternoon and it bled into my behavior in this forum. Even if someone's contribution to this thread doesn't directly help me, it could help someone else. And I don't want to stand in the way of that. Yes, I'm familiar with the GTD setup guides. If anyone is interested in knowing how the David Allen Co. recommends using Evernote for GTD, the setup guides are great. $10 for a digital download. Or, if you join GTD Connect, you get unlimited downloadable guides as part of your membership. Anyway, this exercise was worthwhile for me. I validated that I understand tasks (I wasn't sure I did), I got a chance to learn how others approach GTD in Evernote, and it was a productive discussion. Thanks again to everyone who weighed in.

Actually, they recommended sparing use of tags in that guide, if at all. The setup was creating a notebook to serve as a list, and individual notes for tasks and projects. And I'm aware it worked back then. In fact, at one time I used Evernote for GTD the way they recommended. Maybe, and if that works for someone, that's awesome. But if Evernote tasks are not to my liking, I use Nirvana and Evernote side-by-side and I like how it works for me. There's no fire under my rear-end to change, just curiosity about Evernote tasks.

Yes, I know what it is and where to find it. I have a version of their GTD Setup Guide for Evernote that is for v6. I have no need to get an updated version because the setup they recommended for v6 would work just as well in v10. That's correct. Thanks, but I was asking about Evernote tasks because I'm familiar with all of the other ways I could implement GTD in Evernote.

Thank you again to everyone who chimed in. I doubt at this point I want to make the leap to using Evernote tasks for GTD, but at least I have validated my understanding of them and gotten some good suggestions if I change my mind.

Yeah, that's how the David Allen Co. (David Allen is the author of GTD) recommend you do it. Like you, I don't think Evernote tasks are for me. Which is OK. It seems they're working for a lot of people. I can't expect the world to revolve around me.

What I'm getting from these answers is that I'm not missing anything. Tasks have to be part of a note. This allows grouping tasks by topic or project. Tasks that you don't want to group that way can be part of the default tasks note. There's no way to add any metadata to a task other than due date, reminder, flag and assignee. It sounds to me as though the best way to use Evernote tasks in a GTD-ish way would be to create a note for each context, such as "Calls." All calls could be added to that note. The tasks page will let me see all tasks regardless of their note, or tasks grouped by note. If I did it this way, I wouldn't be able to also link tasks to project notes. Which is not a deal-breaker from a GTD perspective. But I do have the ability to assign a context to a task and also relate it to a project in Nirvana. And when I have a project that needs more support material than I can put in Nirvana (you can only add plain text notes to a task or action in Nirvana), I can create a note in Evernote and then copy the link over to Nirvana. So... I don't think I'm missing anything, at least not if I understand everyone's responses. Thank you all for chiming in.

I thought all tasks had to be in a note, unless by "or not" you mean they're part of the default tasks note. I'm not trying to be persnickety -- I just want to be sure I understand.

I tried experimenting with AI search recently because it sounded cool. As a test, I searched for "how do I structure a story" because I have notes about story structure (I write fiction as a hobby). Some of the notes in the search results were recipes. None of them were the ones about story structure. I suppose it could have been user error but I'm not sure what I would have been doing wrong.

I understand where you're coming from, but in the left nav you can click on "Tasks" and see all of them independently of the notes they're in. It seems to me it's not as much about "making notes actionable" as it is grouping tasks by project, which is how most people do it. GTD is different. But, like I said, we're a niche. Anyway, it's not a big need for me. Nirvana and Evernote work well in tandem. But if there is something I'm missing about how Evernote tasks work, it would be interesting to experiment with them.

I guess according to the Internet social contract, we're supposed to be mortal enemies but I'm just not feeling it. I've seen your posts for years and I've always enjoyed them. I'm glad Quicken works well for you. I hope whatever you found as an alternative to Evernote is working well for you, too. And May the Force Be With You.

I manage my work using a productivity methodology called Getting Things Done, or GTD for short. One of the GTD best practices is to organize your tasks by context (the person, place or tool needed to accomplish the task) rather than by project. The "why" behind it isn't important. But I've noticed that Evernote seems to be moving in the direction of trying to be our main productivity tool by integrating tasks and calendars. I use a separate software tool called Nirvana, which is designed for GTD and does a great job of organizing actions by context while also providing a way to link them to projects. Whereas from what I can see of tasks in Evernote, there's not a lot of metadata you can add. It looks like I can either add tasks to a project, or create a note for each context and list the tasks in that note. Am I missing something? Or is there a way I could organize tasks easily by context but also link them to projects? I'm finding myself using Evernote more and more, and I'm open to the concept of using it as my main productivity tool... if I could find a way to do it that's consistent with my GTD practice. (I'm pretty comfortable using GTD the way I do, so I'm not looking for advice about that. And I also accept that those of us who are devoted GTD'ers are a niche, and I can't expect everyone to cater to us. It just didn't seem like it could hurt to ask.)

Or stick around even if it makes you miserable. I'm not saying it's a great option, but it is an option. Anyway, I learned something about searching in Evernote on my iPhone. I think that's the best use of the forum: get help when needed, give help when possible.

It's wise for anyone to have an exit plan for Evernote or any other software they use, regardless of how healthy they think the company is. But I'd be cautious about using online forums as a gauge for customer sentiment in general. Given the number of people who use Evernote, I feel pretty confident in saying those of us who post in forums like this are in the minority. And I don't think we're representative of the whole customer base. In the opinion survey industry, there's a term called "response bias." It means that the opinions of people who are willing to participate in surveys may differ from those who are not. In much the same way, I think there's a possibility that those of us who participate in forums may be different than those who don't. It may well be that Evernote's overall consumer base may have a much worse opinion of the product than those of us in these forums, or much better, or something in-between. We just don't know. This thread got me thinking about the days when I used Quicken to manage my personal finances. It got to a point where my opinion of the product quality and the technical support was extremely negative, and I was downright angry at Intuit and later Quicken Inc. (Intuit spun off Quicken into its own company). I would take every opportunity I could to give the product scathing reviews at e-commerce sites and anywhere else I could publicly bash Quicken. I was getting increasingly furious about the amount of time I had to spend getting help resolving issues like the sync not working properly. I told myself it would just be too hard to extricate myself from Quicken given how many years of data I had in there. And then one day I thought, "What am I doing? This is nuts?" I canceled my Quicken subscription early this year and subscribed to another product. I did it to make myself happy, not to take my rage out on the company. They're still around, so as far as I know they've got enough customers to keep going, at least for the moment. I don't publicly complain about Quicken anymore or ask why other people have the temerity to disagree with my opinion about it. I don't think about the product or the company anymore. If they have many, many more successful years, God bless 'em. All I know is, I'm happier without them. That's what matters. If I ever decide I have to leave Evernote, I'll leave the same way. Quietly. Happily. Because I feel the only good reason to leave a company is to make my life better, not make theirs worse. A really great author once said, "If you're standing in [expletive deleted], you don't jump up and down on it to punish it, you walk away." If you feel that using Evernote is the equivalent of standing in [expletive deleted], you do have the option of just walking away and being happy about it. Just sayin'.