ยป Review: Getting Things Done with Evernote
My personal GTD system is implemented on Evernote, which has both a web interface and a native iPhone app. Although I always have my iPhone on me (I don’t bother to sync my calendar to the web), I need a desktop interface for doing mass note management, entering long note contents, and cranking through @online notes.
Every note in Evernote goes in one notebook: I have the standard GTD setup although most of my notes are in Next Actions. Every note can have multiple on-the-fly user-defined tags, which I think is vitally important for a GTD system. Evernote can filter the list of notes by tag, but can only do tag intersections (eg: @downtown AND @saturday), not unions (eg: @home OR @downtown) nor other algebra (eg: @home AND NOT @online) – my lists are small enough that that’s not a deal breaker. More annoying is that Evernote can’t do tag hierarchies (eg: all @saturday notes are @weekend), so I end up overtagging. There is no note nesting or linking which I suspect might be useful if I were doing heavier GTD project managment.
I suspect Remember the Milk is better, but I’m not sure it’s $25/year better. I have a design for a better system in my head but I’m happy enough with Evernote not to implement it.
I use Remember the Milk. I’m only doing a pseudo-GTD though, because I’m lazy and I don’t do much. I don’t think it can do complicated tags like that, though. Or maybe it can, I’ve never tried.
Kyla
26 May 09 at 10:54 pm
I asked Kousin Lynn White what system she uses because she’s the single most productive person I’ve ever met.
Turns out she independently came up with a simple GTD (including long and mid-term planning with weekly reviews and 43-ish folders).
Her only context seems to be “@agendabook”, but I’m not productive enough to give her advice on that count. We’re doing some experiments with superproductivity (one hour of effort to accomplish more than one hour of tasks), but I’ll save that for a future post.
Personally, I’ll get higher returns focusing on normal productivity first.
Jack
26 May 09 at 11:50 pm
For implementing GTD you can use this web-based application:
http://www.Gtdagenda.com
You can use it to manage your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
A mobile version is available too.
Dan
27 May 09 at 7:06 am
@Kyla: RTM can do tag algebra. I don’t think it can do tag inheritance, but a good tag algebra system can fake that.
OmniFocus is by far the most powerful cross-platform task management tool, but it’s $80 for the full license. It even has iPhone GPS integration!
Jared
27 May 09 at 9:33 am
Bottom line it for me: Are these apps really more useful than a hipster PDA and some manilla folders? How much more useful?
It seems to me that a hipster will get you 80 or 90 percent of the way there.
Jack
27 May 09 at 10:53 am
@Jack: The cost of modifications to hipster PDAs is way too high. GTD systems need to get out of the way or you just won’t use them.
Jared
27 May 09 at 1:00 pm
BTW, ThinkingRock is a pretty good GTD program too. It slows my computer down too much to use, though.
Kyla
27 May 09 at 7:14 pm
Jared, I want to try this… I need a lesson though, evernote is too flexible, I can’t immediately see how to force it into the system you’ve described…
It has a BlackBerry app (which I haven’t grabbed yet), which makes this worth trying for me… That and Google Notebook is dead.
Ryley
28 May 09 at 8:48 am
[...] by Jared on Wednesday, 2009-June-3rd at 9:02 am As requested: [...]
HOWTO: Get Things Done with Evernote | MentalPolyphonics
3 Jun 09 at 9:02 am
I recently started using Evernote and its “free” storage space is severely limited. I have over 4000 pics on my iphone and have used only half the iphone capacity. I uploaded 166 pics from the iphone to Evernote, used 99% of Evernote upload capacity and recieved a warning notice that Evernote utilization would be restricted until the next cycle. From a practical standpoint Evernotes data restriction allows only 2% utilization of my iphones capacity per month. With this strict data limitation, it is more functional to use my iphone, ipad, and laptops and “Forget Evernote”.
mike012003
23 Feb 11 at 1:45 pm