Evernote and My Mind
Last Sunday I spent consecutive hours watching ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ and scanning every piece of paper I’ve collected over a 3 year degree into Evernote. It started out as procrastination, but it’s maybe the best thing I’ve done to make working and studying easier.
This was what I needed to do before Evernote. I had various folders labelled with an individual topic. There were as many as 100 pages in some of these. To get to the library I need the useful information, which is stuff like reading lists, old essays, maybe some notes. Sorting this stuff out from the collection of papers took maybe 10 minutes if I was lucky. The process involved looking at every piece of paper until I found the right one, mechnically. I pack this in my bag, pray nothing bad happens to it or that I don’t leave anything to be trashed by the cleaners at the library. This all of course assumes that everything was filed correctly. Mistakes can take hours to correct.
Now that I have Evernote things are different. I don’t even do anything at home. When I get to the library, I either go online, or just use my phone. I look to see what my weakest paper is. I find the reading lists, or notes, or whatever I think I need right then, and I’m done. It takes about 10 seconds.
It’s pretty sweet.
It’s flexible. If I’m going to a coffee shop, I can get at lecture handouts and chapter scans and journal articles in the same way, in the same 10 seconds.
Evernote has 3 important features.
1) It keeps everything in one place. It can handle any kind of file. When you need to deal with something, the first step is always simple – put it in Evernote.
2) It uses tags, not folders. The problem with folders (physical or digital) is that you can only have an item in one place. So you have to find the right folder to find the item. With tags, an item can basically be in multiple folders at once. So if you want to find your draft for a blog post you’ve got a higher chance of finding it first time around. It can be in ‘work’ or ‘drafts’ or ‘blog posts’. With folders, you’d have to search each of those until you found it.
3) It backs up everything. Evernote saves all the documents, in the chosen filing system, online. You can use it from a phone, tablet, browser, or desktop in exactly the same way. So if you adapt, you’re golden.
Here’s how I’ve broken all my study materials down for access.
I work by using reading lists to find material to study from. So the first thing I did was tag all my reading lists. Each list was tagged ‘reading list’, ‘[module], and ‘[topic]’ . So the reading list for utilitarianism, a topic for my Ethics module, is tagged ‘reading list’, ‘Ethics’ and ‘Utilitarianism’. When I want that file, I select all three tags at once. If I want to choose a topic in Ethics, I might just choose ‘reading list’ and ‘Ethics’, which would give me lists for all my topics. And so on.
If I want an essay on a topic I can replace the ‘reading list’ tag with the ‘Essay’ tag. Or if I want all the notes to go with utilitarianism, I can can use ‘Notes’. Or I can just choose the ‘Utilitarianism’ and get everything on that topic, essays, reading lists, notes, and possibly more.
I can find out what my weakest area is by looking at which topic has the least notes associated with it. I feel like the more I’ve worked on a topic, the better prepared I am. Everyday I work on my least prepared topic. I can do this by looking at the numbers of documents in each topic.
So this is how to build an Evernote system that works like this.
The first step is just scanning. There are solutions for Mac and Windows that allow you to keep pressing a button that will scan a document and automatically add it to Evernote. This takes time, but unless you’re talking thousands of items, if you’re efficient and caffeinated it can be done in a matter of hours.
Applying Evernote to a workflow is about identifying something you do frequently, and then translating that into an Evernote action. My example was every morning I needed to know what I was taking to the library. So I turned that from a process of looking through folders for the right pieces of paper to clicking “<topic> + reading list + essays + lecture handouts + etc etc etc”.
Tag each file twice. First tag with a single noun. This should be simple and generic (‘Work’, ‘Money’, ‘Academic’).
Second, tag with a phrase. This will probably be more than one word, and quite specific (‘Reading List’, ‘The Johnson Account’, ‘Starbucks Receipts’).
When you need to find a file, select the relevant tags. If it’s not immediately intuitive which tag you’d need, introduce a more specific phrase.
Hope that helps.
Hi Dave,
Thanks for sharing your experience. I’ve been using Evernote for a number of years and have found it invaluable. I’ve yet to start digitising my written notes, but tend not to make that many, so not too much of an issue – I tend just to write up action points from the notes into Evernote, so I don’t miss anything.
Multiple tags makes a lot of sense, too. I do something similar (and it appears that this is how most ‘experienced’ Evernote / GTDers manage their notes, too).
The one thing that’s certain is that you’ll need dedication to keep on top of things – having a good routine and sticking to it is paramount.
Ady