sfmike

Great tip - that did the trick. Thanks!

When I boot computer and launch Evernote, it opens with "Opening Database" message for a minute or so. That message closes and my database seems to open, but application is nonresponsive and closes. Tray application stays in memory, but killing it reproduces the same problem. New Alienware i5 computer with up-to-date Windows 10 and 8GB RAM, plenty of hard drive space, etc. Tried reinstalling Evernote(version 6.15.3) but didn't help. Can't load application at all. Unfortunately I can't send the activity log since the application won't load. I have plus level account and opened a ticket a week ago, but haven't got any response. Suggestions?

Thanks @Smacs! Closing the search window has at least eliminated an obvious cause of this annoying issue.

I guess it's my workflow. Say I'm looking at my action folder with the tag "house" - that is when I want to add related items. Also, it drove me crazy that creating a new note/task removed the tags from the view. This made my process much smoother.

Yeah that's a difference - I don't really use due dates or regular recurring tasks. Upon reflection, I think my method owes as much to Scrum as GTD...

I've been using a GTD inspired process in Evernote for a couple of years. I have Task folder with two notebooks - Action Pending and Completed. I use two main tags: .What for the domain (Family, Finances, House, Career, Personal, etc.) and .When (0-Daily, 1-Now, 2-Next, etc.). I don't use any of the other apps described above, but I do have a canned search for Action Pending-Now. For me the simple power of this approach (as advocated in GTD) is being able to build a big backlog of tasks, but be able to process it either by area or urgency. For me at least, it's hard to overstate the negative impact of a giant list. BTW, one key hack needed for my method is a registry edit that automatically creates new notes using the current view (Notebook + selected tags). You can find that thread here. Good luck!

Works great for me too Greg - thanks for sharing!

+1 for this request. I've started using Evernote for task management following the lines of GTD and am now making much more extensive use of tagging. While there are other ways to get this done (templates, etc.), I think automatically applying the tags in the current view when composing new notes has several distinct advantages: 1. Since this is your current view, it is logical that you are working / thinking about this area 2. It is an easy toggle to change to view to change the default (easier than having to find another Notebook for instance) In my case for instance, I'm frequently looking at my notebook "Action Pending" with a tag selected like "Family". It jars me every time I go to add a note, and it kicks me back up to all notes in "Action Pending." I think the interface between reviewing notes and creating related new ones should be as smooth as possible. That's done today for Notebooks, but not for tags... Thanks.

No it wouldn't. Evernote does not "lock" records. So if two people are editing the same note, simultaneously, you're going to get a conflict, no matter if the sync time is five minutes or 20 minutes. With Evernote, the way to avoid conflicts is to sync the app/device before starting, make changes, sync changes up & be sure no one else on any other device is editing the same note. True, but I have experienced sync conflicts as a single user, which I attribute to the sync delay. Smaller delay should equate to lower probability of conflict. Of course you can control this by manually syncing, but my whole point is that this should not be required and Evernote seems to be working to improve things.

Why is this harder? Note sizes can be arbitrarily large as well. And why is syncing binary more difficult than syncing text? Is there an intrinsic difference between text and binary? They're just bytes on the line, right?Anyways, judging by the Windows client, they've been doing some work on better syncing and synchronization of note edits. Open the activity log (if you're using the Windows client) and start editing a note, and watch the activity. You should see syncing going on at brief intervals (one minute?) while you're editing the note, and when you change to a different note. Not real-time, but more finely grained than before, I believe. You should also notice that if you try to simultaneous edit the same note simultaneously on a different device, you'll probably get a warning about it; I do on my Android device anyways. I don't know that it's completely bullet-proof yet, but anything they can do to lessen the occurrence of note conflicts is a good thing. I don't know how feasible it is to just sync the small changes, they might be transmitting the whole note; notes' ENML formatting are validated on upload to the server, as far as I know. Thanks for the tip Jeff. I tried that now with a small update to an existing note. It took about four minutes for the change to sync - certainly better than 15 minutes, but could be better IMHO. As far as sync conflicts, obviously shorter sync windows would result in fewer conflicts. BTW, if you read my original post, I was not saying that all changes should sync near real-time, but rather that there should (and perhaps is) some kind of velocity / change index so that smaller changes could be processed very quickly. If the sync engine was properly designed, then it should be configurable to adapt to new needs. Syncing large binaries is more resource intensive on the network / server side, so it makes sense that larger changes may go slower. I've worked on messaging and file syncing applications before, and tuning them to balance performance and resources is an interesting problem. I'd like to see it improved so that Evernote works even better.

That's not what I'm saying. Obviously development has a cost, but some things are more difficult / expensive than others. My point is not that Evernote should do this because Dropbox does, but rather that what Dropbox is doing is harder (syncing random size binary files versus small amounts of text). Anyway sounds like they are suffering some growing pains, and it's at least good to hear that syncing is on their short list of improvement areas... http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/01/04/on-software-quality/

Just switching between my laptop and desktop and added a new 81KB file to dropbox. Switched to the other computer and file was there in < 5 seconds. That's the equivalent of ~ 30 pages of text. Can't see why Evernote could not do the same.

Back to my original topic, I think Dropbox is a good example of how things should work. Changes trickle through without waiting for a defined time interval or manual sync. I just uploaded new spreadsheet and it was available within seconds on my other machine. Sure giant files take longer. If they can do it for random binary files, I think Evernote would be able to do it even better / faster at least for text changes.

Thanks for the pointer to the sync interval - I've lowered mine down to 15 minutes. My point about batching large changes was simply that they are treating all changes the same (batching them in time intervals), whereas I think large changes could be handled differently from small ones. I understand the need to conserve resources on their side, but having near-instant sync for smaller changes would be a welcome addition.

I have been using Evernote for work notes for a couple of years, and have recently expanded my use to include task management (GTD) and Evernote Food. However, one thing that has bugged me for a while is the sync behavior. I frequently switch back and forth between my home computer, work laptop and phone. It's quite common for me to add a task for example on the laptop, close it up, then expect to see it when I check my home machine. However, it's my experience that I need to press the sync button on the laptop if I want any changes to show up. I can understand why they designed the app to sync asynchronously and to batch large changes, but I don't see why small changes (e.g. editing text or adding a note) shouldn't be synchronized in near real time. Couldn't there be a velocity index to allow small changes to sync quickly while gating large changes? Thanks to the team for an awesome product.