Evernote - revisited

I've written in the past about the tools I use to get my work done or about my quest to find the best outliner application. As some of my colleagues loooove Evernote, I decided to give it another try. Also because I need a place to store larger notes to search later. My Moleskine basic notebook is just for fleeting notes. Creating a Google doc for every little note doesn't work. And Google Keep doesn't hold larger notes well. Hence my need for an intermediate digital notebook, accessible from many devices and searchable.

Upon installation Evernote migrated all my data to the new version. This seemed to indicate a bunch of things had changed since I originally experimented with it. Indeed, the outliner works well: easy to indent and outdent. It still lacks a folding capability unfortunately. Copy and paste bulleted lists (my favorite), into an email works. I love it.

However, there are still a few issues:

1. Evernote was slow as a snail on my 2008 macbook pro. Even with only a few notes. Evernote CPU time hovered between 15-25%. That was strange and unless this improves after a restart of the application will be a deal killer. 
2. The application lacks a "remove formatting" feature, or it was not obvious to me where to find it. When copy/pasting information from different website, you would think that feature is a must-have-feature to write a somewhat unified note. 
3. The Simplify Formatting option is confusing. It seemed to split words at arbitrary locations. 
4. Email note should be a very easy to find option under the Share button. It is however buried a few clicks away. But now we are starting to get picky, I agree. 

Tools of the trade

Lifehacker.com has made a living from documenting productivity tools for your daily life. Getting things done websites each pitch their own methodology and tools. Which tools work for you is a personal affair. Here's a list of the tools I use:

• Email, Calendar and Writing: both at home and at work I use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, and Google Docs/Drive. While Apple Mail, iCal and Addressbook synchronize with Google services, I tend to use the browser as the main interface. I am a big fan of the Gmail simple interface and use the tabbed Inbox daily. A common theme for all the tools is the cloud aspect: data is stored in the cloud and synchronizes across operating systems and platforms between my work laptop, my personal laptop, my iPad and Android HTC One phone. 
• Todo list: I experiment every few months with new todo managers. For about a year I use doit.im. I love the simple and easy interface, and the fact it works with David Allen's GTD system, which I use. 
• Taking notes: at work I use Microsoft Word in outline mode for taking personal notes. Unfortunately nothing meets my requirements for a great outliner. When I need to share notes with my colleagues, I use Google Docs. Similarly at home, I tend to go to Google Docs. I never got into Evernote, as it lacks some basic outliner features. Since recent I started using Google Keep for simple snippets and pictures of whiteboards. A big advantage is that synchronizes with Google Drive and has the ability to distinguish between my work and personal Google accounts. On my iPad, I use Notability to take notes. I like the ability to mix text, pictures and sketches. Sadly only iOS is supported by Notability.
• Drafting and Sketching: I like Paper on the iPad, although I often run out of screen real estate, and my fingers are too fat. I tend to stick with rudimentary sketches of ideas or basic X-Y graphs. 
• News and blog reading: ever since the demise of Google Reader (darn you Google!), I switched to Digg Reader. I am a big fan of RSS readers. I use Flipboard on my iPad. I catch up on interesting presentation using Slideshare. 
• Social media: I live in a socially segregated world: I post tidbits on Twitter (it's open to the world), I restrict LinkedIn to work and professional sharing, I answer questions on Quora and Stackoverflow. I like Google+ - no surprise for Google fanboy. Although you would think I barely use Google+ as most of my sharing is with family in a walled off family community. I do find a lot of substantial information sharing on Google+, unlike on Facebook. I log in to Facebook to catch up with the gossip du jour among my friends. I am your stereotypical Instagram user sharing food, drinks and signs. I limit sharing of personal and family pics to my walled off Google+ community. (yes, I am married and have two kids, but you wouldn't know from Facebook or Instagram.) Buffer.App helps me posting to social media. 
• Instant messaging: Adium (iOS)
• Video Conferencing: I use Webex at work, as it has the benefit to allow people to dial in from a mobile phone or landline. At home, Google Hangouts is streaming our household across the pond every weekend. 
• Data Storage: MacOS Time Machine to USB hard drives and a Synology NAS, combined with Google Docs and DropBox. I use DropBox only for a few things: using IFTTT to store all my Instagram pictures in a single folder and for whitepapers, eBooks and other reading material as I can open it on any of my devices. 
• eBooks: I dropped iBooks for Kindle on iOS and Android. Regardless of the device I can access my book. 
• Experimental tools: TicTrac as my personal data dashboard; Prezi for online presentations. 
• Specialized: Microsoft project, and a whole suite of Software development tools. 

When you take a moment to list all the applications you use, you are amazed about how many there are. I wonder how things got done 25 years ago. 

Let me know if you have any interesting tools or if a category is missing.

On outliners

I've been on the look out for a powerful outliner tool for a while. At work I use primarily the outline mode of Microsoft Word, and it does it decent job. Although it lacks search and tagging capability. OneNote appears to be great, but is only available on Windows only systems (I use a Mac). For my to-do list I build a system around RememberTheMilk.com. I'll try to document this in another post. As for outliners, every so often I return to Evernote to check if they added a true outliner feature, but I walk away disappointed that it is more about the images and videos, than about providing the true outliner capability. I've been experimenting recently with Workflowy.com as an outliner tool.  So far, I've been impressed about its snappiness, and copy/paste functionality. I started to keep track of a list of items I like in a good outliner:

(note: the copy/paste feature from Workflowy ain't perfect yet)

Outliners

• Outline are not the same as lists or a to-do list. Trying to do both results in a liger.
  • Outliners allow you to take organized notes, including larger text blocks, drawings or pictures.
  • To-do lists have more context
    • Priority
    • Location
      • e.g., @work, @home, @web
      • GPS: e.g., @TraderJoes, @Lowes
    • Items belong to Projects
    • You can organize items using tags, resulting in Smartlists
    • State: nextAction; waiting (following the GTD workflow)
    • Notifications/Alerts
      • Mobile device
      • Instant Message
      • Calendar integration
• Outliners support many levels of Indentation
  • Supporting Folding (a must)
• Notes should be easily converted to email
  • Send from the outliner
  • Or support easy Copy/Paste
• Outliners allow for easy importing notes
  • From Microsoft Word documents
  • From email (forward email to a specific email address)
  • Copy/past text as note details.
• Outliners shall support exporting notes
  • Microsoft Word (Outline mode)
• Provide support for Online/Offline access
• Organization of notes
  • Folders
  • Tags == context
    • SmartLists
• Search
  • by date
  • by tag
  • by topic or keyword
• Collaboration and access control
• Formatting
  • bold/italic
  • color

Created with WorkFlowy.com