sterlingz

Following the GTD philosophy, I've always found that Evernote was more suited to being my reference system, not my contexts. In other words, I don't think of it as my "todo list", but rather a kick-butt filing cabinet.

Totally agree - I use Evernote to clip all kinds of stuff and even manage some documents. I did try the Evernote GTD pseudo-functionality, but decided it was much too limited. After trying a bunch of different tools, I'm now using Things from Cultured Code. It's not perfect, and the developers are incredibly slow about putting out updates (nothing like the crew at Evernote that is constantly improving the apps for all platforms), but it works much better for GTD.

it sounds like you are saying that every sentence in a word processing document can be in a random order as long as you have a search engine to help you find the sentence you want.

thats great if you want a sentence, but what if you want to read the entire document start to finish by browsing the heirarchy (table of contents)? what if you don't know exactly what you are looking for? what if you know the general area but not the specific search terms? what if a search comes up with too many matches? subfolders solve all of these issues.

i don't agree on the google/web analogy because the next time you search the information may change - the web is dynamic, my information is personal and only i change it, so i like to know where it is exactly so i can jump right to the proper spot when the time comes. This is why i'm having trouble understanding the rigidness of evernote, and why a simple concept like subfolders to tuck items away in their proper place is so unknown.

seems to me you have not decided if you are random or organized information manager. if you are organized - you need folders so we can organize these notes into places where like things stay together, and then use the powerful search when we are looking across all items. if you are random, let us move items anywhere we want to and don't sort them automatically - and again we can use the search or browse as we choose.

I couldn't agree more. This whole discussion reminds me of when Steve Jobs proclaimed that folders would be irrelevant after Spotlight was introduced in Tiger, which of course was nonsense.

The bottom line is that we need both - Hierarchy and Search. For the reason well-stated above that we cannot always remember the search terms.

And if there really are no sub-notebooks planned, and tags really are going to be the only way to organize notes, then there should be a new UI for managing them, such as a HUD. Managing them in the sidebar is just awful, especially if you have as many as I do. I am going to try and reduce the number of tags I have as I have been creating them wily-nilly, but again, with sub-folders, it wouldn't be necessary to limit them.

Lack of subfolders seems utterly bizarre to me, and I'm going to reconsider my Premium subscription as I'm not sure how much more data I want to put into a flat system.

Could not agree with this feature request more. We need subnotebooks yesterday. This is an absolutely baffling omission from an otherwise great product.

I had a whole series of "2009" notebooks that were labeled as such so they would be at the top of my list. Well, now that I've started a series of 2010 notebooks, they fall beneath the 2009 ones. I've had to go and rename all my old notebooks so they're not at the top of the list. I would much rather move them to an "archived 2009" folder, and not have to do that, and be able to keep them grouped together for easy reference. I now have about 25 notebooks, so my list is getting out of control. I need to nest some of those into logical containers to clean up my sidebar.

Tags DO NOT get the job done. We need hierarchy.

Cultured Code, maker of Things has a similar issue with their task management software in that they will not add sub-projects. But they at least added "Areas of Responsibility" as a way to group projects, and this has gone a long way to adding some hierarchy.