Atif

hope it helps you out. I have fully moved to RoamResearch (and coda.io for some scenarios) and am slowly migrating stuff out of evernote. Had a great decade with the elephant!

Remembering the vision of Evernote over the years: Remember Everything (somewhere around 2010-2011) Your Life's best work (I think this was when Tim Ferris started advocating it) Current: Your notes. Organized. Effortless. The first two served their purpose really well during their times IMHO. The current one, not so sure... Your Notes: The ENML format and the HTML exports are not necessarily mine. It's non-trivial to move these notes to others without effort. The API helps but it leads to a digital divide for the non-tech-savvy to make notes their own. (Unless ownership simply means you can offload from one Evernote and back up to another instance) Organized: Wasn't that OneNote's vision, to have a proper place for every thing, neatly organised and 'filed'. And wasn't Evernote the cool tool that helped us avoid all of that organisation and let us simply 'pile' our stuff. And along with powerful tagging, we had a brilliant search interface, quiet similar to the metaphorical portray of iconography with the brain. So is Evernote transitioning to the Filers from the Pilers camp? Or is it trying to serve both? And is that good for either? Effortless: Taxonomies are made with the tax of sweat and toil. The overhead of organising things top-down was bearable before these new tools came out. Now, if we simply give up with taxonomies and just drop everything there for search to do its magic, should Tenet 2 still hold true? One way Evernote can thrive again is by thinking of itself in lines of a dating app. The best dating apps are the ones that get deleted Solve the customer's core job. For people who are all over the place with their content and thoughts, Evernote can bring the calm to the storm and help people get more methodical about their lives. And as they are initiated, they will look elsewhere to cover for feature parity (and value) and will face the complexity of multiple tools and a higher subscription cost (not necessarily TCO) OR will simply satisfice with a single reliable tool. I did a quick sketch to see what this would look like for some: From a meagre 10 USD of Evernote base subscription to roughly 56 USD to get specialised apps. With no data at our disposal, I can only anecdotally guess a pricing change is on the table: New Entrants: Free tier (Same as before) with caveats. Bundle coaching services from Disciples to get their lives organised. Gamify Usage, get affiliate partner network to incentivise. Loyalists: Base tier (to be increased to 15 USD) with no limits. (Premium essentially) the moment I can no more upload a 50MB file to Evernote because I am in the mid-tier, I go to another tool. For the loyalists, the tool gets out of their way and they love it, they get their jobs done. Gamify usage and participation to become Disciples. Disciples: Premier tier (free on selected months, 15 USD otherwise) with no limits (but fully premium) They get to offer specialised training to New Entrants on organising Life. When New Entrants become paying members, they get their month's free. Special Badge (like the Certified one today, although I am not sure what that badge does or how is it given). The X: Went elsewhere but are what they are today due to Evernote Build the mindshare of how good Evernote is to get started in getting their lives in shape. While you may notice all this 'in the air' day dreaming, this is mere distraction. I am sure Evernote is coming up with some good news

"Graph DBs are great for understanding relationships across heterogeneous data, inferencing, and more easily working with novel queries. But it would be expensive and burdensome to add one just to do backlinks. If you can do regular links (in any database) you can do backlinks. It’s just a question of priorities. " Good pick @Joe Pairman, I should have elaborated it earlier. It is what backlinks enables in terms of query capability at scale and at speed that is quite exclusive to graph database AFAIK. Many queries in a networked thought are queries over inter-related records that are simply too expensive to scale in a non-graph engine. PostgreSQL is trying a few things with clever indices and data types but its a combo of both graph storage and graph compute. Don't like to toot the other tool's horn here, but they have managed to break a page / note into its independent blocks and then we have a graph database of these units essentially. Nothing much Evernote can do about it, its how products evolve, new entrants always have the advantage to leapfrog with a superior technology and an empty slate. it's interesting to see one of Evernote's most vocal advocates, Tiago Forte, come out with a video earlier this week where he opines that Evernote's future is better served focusing on service reliability rather than trying to mimic what others are doing. In saying so, I do know RoamResearch has been bringing him to their camp and it seems its working. Here's the video about the future of Evernote by Tiago:

I think Evernote, RoamResearch and Notion appeal to different styles of thinking and working. I use all three for different purposes but Evernote is and has been my solid foundation for almost 10 years. Here are my opinionated views, if they may help: Does the tool get out of the way? : YES: Evernote and RoamResearch NO: Notion Does the tool allow bottom up thinking where i can create concepts and then carry out chunking and then allow me to create repetitive cards? YES: RoamResearch and Evernote (via search and tagging) NO: Notion Does the tool have an easy learning and mastering curve? YES: Evernote NO: RoamResearch and Notion Does the tool provide co-editing and collaboration well with others? YES: RoamResearch and Notion NO: Evernote (not to the par) Does the tool work across devices and form factors well? YES: RoamResearch and Notion No: Evernote Does the tool work offline and offers rock solid reliability of my data? YES: Evernote NO: Notion (offline & syncing issues) NOT SURE: RoamResearch (is a relatively new services so yet to see how it scales) Does the tool offer competitive pricing? YES: Notion and Evernote NO: RoamResearch (15 USD per month, no tiers, no apps) Does the tool offer versatility across use cases like knowledge management, task management, records and filing cabinets, memories, etc YES: Evernote and Notion NO: RoamResearch (they are trying but its pretty ugly outside of knowledge management) Newer companies always have the ability to leapfrog due to a better technology stack to begin with. However, Evernote is promising their behind the scenes overhaul brings it back to the new age. Features will then be easier to release as this is a company which has stood on its own for quite a while.

All for getting the foundations rock solid. Not bothered by the lack of news. Although I sense the company may be going through culture problems, perhaps by over-reading the body language in the last few behind the scenes videos. Also noticed the forums are not very active as such compared to other tools. But, Evernote is hiring data scientists and product designers on their career pages. All fo these are healthy signs for a company ready to pivot (culturally), getting in some fresh eyes and hearts and apparently not panicking with flashy competitor noise. Perhaps this is dealing with attrition, perhaps pressure is cascading down... Personally, I hate cognitive overheads, I love Evernote because the editor is simple, i have memorised keyboards shortcuts on Mac and the tool just gets out of my way. Its stable, its reliable and it doesn't offer me too many distractions. However, I have also discovered that there are certain features that are a must. For example, back linking and blocks like in RoamResearch and Obsidian. I am experimenting with my personal knowledge management outside Evernote nowadays. I hate juggling between tools but i have to as that feature gives me what i want. I still keep PDFs and other documents on Evernote (except for large ones that don't work in my quota) I also think the task lists and tables can do with a bit more intelligence, things that Notion, Coda and Airtable do. Saves me repetitive work, but those tools are so loaded that with a vocabulary that it slows me down to a drag. The point is not about my wishlist, I take it more as a long term perspective. For the past 5 years roughly, each November I have been going through an overhead of deciding to churn or not, somehow i stick after trials with others. Is Evernote ensuring their most loyal customer base remains intact? Awesome if they are! Is Evernote going to revamp some of its foundations to allow features to be built that previously weren't possible, e.g. backlinks (graph database required), shorthands for markdown, embedded videos, etc (all requiring web in a desktop) etc. I am not sure yet, and this is what will bug me in November again. PS: I realised I lost my Evernote wallet Edits:: 28 AUG, 2020: Obsidian doesn't have blocks as of today.

Congrats to the winners and looking for even better features for dashboarders in 2020 by Evernote

You are welcome @JohnOem. The best things in life are simple Glad there is someone out there using a similar technique

oh sorry for not making the screenshots clear. The content is not changing, its just a very long table that doesn't fit in one screen and need to be scrolled down. Notice the scrollbar on the extreme right in each screenshot.

Love this idea, will be especially handy on touch screens I reckon. I love Canva too 🙂 but for instagram mostly 😅

"That's valid, but it limits the scope (I removed Notes from this discussion's title) Your method forces a dynamic notelist" less is more I purposefully target just a single metric through the notebooks interface. " Also, you might use a Shortcut for easier access In which case you're not restricted to a Notebook; it could be a tag or saved search" Already do "You might want to specify a year in the note title instead of just Week nn I have daily notes with title 2019/12/07 Journal [2019.341 Saturday]" Thought of that some years back but happy with keeping a notebook with 52 notes only. Comes Jan 1, the entire notebook gets renamed to 2019 and a fresh new 'Weekl'y notebook starts. You can see I am a minimalist and don't like 'non-data' ink as Stephen Few puts it here. Also, by not mentioning the year, I can search more easily for say 'week 51' across all past years and compare instead of searching for substrings like '/12/07' or similar for example

I imagine dynamic content to be added via Evernote APIs (programming / developing it yourself). More on Evernote's developer pages

Great convo folks and thanks for the kudos. A few points to clarify about my Evernote usage. I use Evernote on my mac, windows, android phone and iPad. Hence, it is interoperable across all devices and form factors. A dashboard for me is a notebook, not a note. I call it 'Weekly'. Each week is represented as a single note in the notebook. I use a single color coded metric (Good, Average, Bad) week based on a qualitative assessment at the end of each week. At the end of the year, I just count the number of good, average and bad weeks and thats about it. Infact, I keep an active counter, incremented weekly. Its the first thing you will notice on each note. e.g. '[G] 15 [A] 23 [ B ] 11' . My mantra is to get some really good weeks in a year, those will have a greater impact and ensure your bad weeks are contained or spaced out. Thats it! The most important thing for me is to track recent weeks and what small changes or nudges i can do in my life to recover from bad and average weeks and get to atleast one good week a month. Its similar to Seinfield's don't break the chain concept but applied on weeks instead of individual habits. I have decided to format each week (each note) as a single column long table to make it nicely formatted and scrollable on mobile, nothing else. I achieve the above views through built in Evernote layout options on desktops (both mac and windows) The view consists of three columns, the middle column is changed to card view and sorted alphabetically in descending order Note that this is Evernote's application layout, not an individual note's layout. @robinnj Each card ends with a picture of a coloured square which Evernote automatically picks up as the card picture in the middle column (Evernote layout). The middle column's width is adjustable with drag and drop, at the expense of the note's width. This is not a problem since I am already using a single column note and can accomodate squeezing the note to make more room for the middle column. I also use a set of tightly controlled tags and saved searches to keep me 'in the flow'. 've been evolving this system since 2016, all on Evernote (<:3) and have become better at practicing my own system with inspiration from David Allen's GTD, 'The One Thing', 'Atomic Habits', 'The Habit Loop', ''The Secret Weapon GTD', etc and above all this article from Scott Adams. Too bad this is a US only thread, could get some Evernote love here in Down Under (that's Australia for the uninitiated).. Thanks @Sayre Ambrosio for answering @robinnj correctly.

Fantastic post and great dashboards folks, loving it! I've been feeding my OCD for almost 4 years now (few days left :)), here's a snapshot of what my dashboard currently looks like. Essentially, I break it down to 52 weeks, each week consolidating activities from projects, tasks, a bit of journal and daily drivers. Its a very elongated single column table to make it easy on mobile interfaces.