Category Archives: Evernote

Productivity 2021

My second most popular post ever describes my Emacs Writing Setup. (My most popular post, if you’re interested, is this one.)

I wrote five novels and about thirty short stories using the method described in my Emacs Writing Setup, all the while experimenting with other methods. For example, I replicated some Scrivener features in Emacs and wrote about them here.

But over the past year all this has changed. So much so that I’m rewriting my Emacs Writing Setup from scratch.

So what’s changed? Briefly, I’ve started using Zettelkasten, org-roam and Doom Emacs for my writing flow. This has had a knock on effect for my productivity flow in general.

Over the next few months I’ll be going over my new set up. Let me know what you think.

You’re using folders and tags the wrong way round

According to Ian Small, CEO of Evernote, only 5% of Evernote users use tags. Evernote is not the only application that uses tags and folders, and I suspect the picture is similar in other applications. Most users rely on folders alone to categorize their work. I can understand this. Everyone has used paper folders in real life, the folders in applications replicate this experience.

However I think tagging is better, the reason being that although a note can only be in one folder, it can have more than one tag.

Here’s an example. Suppose you have personal notes and work notes. Some of those notes are just regular notes, some notes outline projects. You could tag your notes as follows:

  • Holiday (personal, project)
  • Shopping (personal)
  • User Manual (work, project)
  • Presentation (work)

Tagging like this gives you more flexibility. You can now filter for all of your projects, or filter for work projects only. By adding additional tags for things such as year 2021, 2022 you can then find, for example, all the personal projects you started in 2021.  Tagging gives your searches a granularity you don’t get by using folders.

Does that mean folders are no use? No. Folders are useful when something can only be on one state. A good example is :

  • Todo
  • In Progress
  • Done

You can set up those three folders and move notes between them. This is the opposite of the commonly recommended practice that you tag work with Todos.

Why are folders better? Because notes can only be in one folder at a time. It’s possible to accidentally tag a note as both Todo and Done. There’s also something quite satisfying about dragging a note from the In Progress to the Done folder…

What if you want to separate your work and personal to-dos? There are two ways. You can go to the Todo folder and filter by work or personal tags. Or it might be easier just to have two sets of folders

  • Work Todo
  • Work in Progress

And

  • Personal Todo
  • Personal in progress

Does it matter if you’re using folders and tags the wrong way round? Of course not. If you can find the right note at the right time, your system is fine. My suggestion is that using tags correctly adds flexibility.

Seduced by Productivity

I feel that I’ve been seduced by productivity. 

It’s been a gradual process. It began when I discovered GTD. At the time I was swamped with work. I constantly felt there was something else more important that I should be doing. GTD reassured me that I wasn’t neglecting anything, it organised my life. You can implement GTD with a pen and paper. I used Emacs.

That’s where the seduction began. You see, Emacs is just too useful. You can use it for everything, and for years I did. I used Emacs for everything from writing novels to reminding me to chase people for returns at work. It was my calendar, my project planner, my note taking system, everything. 

But slowly I started to introduce other applications into my workflow. Like most people, I spend a lot of my time away from my desktop computer and so I had gradually moved some of my work onto Evernote and Todoist: apps that work well in a web browser or an a mobile phone.   

I spent most of 2020 at my desk: it will probably be the last year that I use Emacs for everything. Emacs remains a powerful, flexible tool that I will use for many aspects of my writing, tech and personal life, however despite such excellent applications as Orgzly and Beorg (both of which I use), there’s no getting away from the fact that Emacs works best as a desktop application.   

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Evernote for years. I currently love it and the direction it’s going, but therein lies the problem. Like Emacs, Evernote is getting just too useful.

I’ve heard it said that before there were washing machines and vacuum cleaners people were content to wash and clean much less frequently. New technology made these tasks easier and so people did them more often.

It’s the same with tools like Emacs and Evernote and Todoist. They mean I can be more productive, and so I am.

But since when did being productive become my primary aim?

Productivity tools mean I can be a more productive writer, but I didn’t start writing because I wanted to be productive. I started because I enjoyed writing, because I had something to say. Over the years I found I was writing because my todo list told me to.

Yes, I want to be more efficient, yes, I don’t want to forget things, but why should productivity be my principle goal? I can understand that it’s my boss’s aim for me to be more productive, but why should it be mine? 

I had a revelation a few months ago about my writing regime. I wrote about it here, and what I said there still holds true. 

I continue to use Emacs, Evernote, Todoist, but now I try to use them to improve my work life balance. I use them to try and maximize enjoyment of what I’m doing. Yes, I frequently forget this and slip back into old habits, but I’m getting the hang of a new way of working.

It’s much more satisfying.

Goodbye Simplenote, Hello Again Evernote

We’ve all got a list of our favourite CEOs.

Okay, we haven’t. But if we did, mine would be Ian Small of Evernote.  You can see him here, clearly uncomfortable at being in front of the camera. I rather like him for that. Being good on camera doesn’t mean you can do the job. I’m increasingly wondering if the opposite might be true.

Anyway, read this message Ian Small wrote back in January, stating Evernote’s priorities for the year ahead. I particularly liked this passage:

And honesty requires us to state—straight out—that we can do better with the product you have today than we are currently doing. In fact, we can do better than we have been doing for some years.

He goes on to promise to concentrate on getting the foundations of the product right before adding new features.

Since then he seems to be making good on his promise.  

You might remember this article I wrote in 2016 saying I was leaving Evernote for Simplenote. Well, I’ve now gone back to Evernote. I like the direction things are going. I’m still disappointed with the lack of Linux support but I’ll trade that in for something that’s solid, or at least is attempting to get things right.

And I must admit, I rather like Ian Small’s (rather awkward) style.  Many people seek advancement by promising to make big changes.  They go for the grand gesture and then move on, leaving others to sort out the mess they’ve made. It’s rather refreshing to see someone quietly getting on with the challenge of trying to make something that’s already quite good work just that little bit better.

Goodbye Evernote, Hello Simplenote

Simplenote launched a client for Linux at the end of March, 2016. As a longstanding Evernote premium user, frustrated initially by the fact there’s no Linux client, and then frustrated even more by the fact I could no longer get the Windows client to run under WINE, I thought I’d give it a look.

As the name implies, Simplenote is simpler than Evernote. No notebooks, no reminders, no support for pictures.

In fact the only thing Simplenote handles is text, and that’s its great strength. Sticking to tiny text files means that notes load and sync quickly. Also, the whole experience doesn’t seem as cluttered as Evernote has become with its "all things to all people" approach.

Sticking to text means that Simplenote does a few things extremely well. It has Markdown support built in, for example. I write most of my Evernote notes using markdown format, but Evernote has a habit of adding extra hidden formatting that only becomes obvious when those notes are opened in Draft or Stackedit (it also throws in odd whitespace characters when I copy notes across to Emacs)

Simplenote allows you to download a zip file of all your notes, and its at this point the advantage of sticking to text only really hits home: the files downloaded are text files. That sounds obvious, but it means that rather than picking your way through xml or whatever, you can open an individual note in your favourite text editor and start editing. It’s that simple.

Keeping things text also reduces memory usage, which in turn allows Simplenote to add a history feature – pull back a slider and see previous versions of your notes.

There are some things that aren’t quite there… For example, although you can tag notes in Simplenote, I’ve yet to find a way to filter multiple tags, something that is essential if you want to replicate Evernote’s notebook stacks, which I do.

In summary then, Simplenote does a lot of things better than Evernote, but it’s not a full Evernote replacement.

So which will I be using in future?

No question. Simplenote, for the sole reason that it has the Linux client. It’s not just a question of what to do when there’s no internet connection, it’s also a question of speed. Chrome is so big nowadays it takes an appreciable amount of time to load. Add to that the occasional hiccup when changing between notes on a web browser and the benefits of having a client become obvious.

I wrote this blog entry on Evernote. It may be the last one I do…