How Not To Drown in Info: Evernote

For a while now I have been drowning in information. I suspect you have too. It is a phenomenon, which seems to grow exponentially the more time we spend on computers. Back in the day when emails and bulletin boards were a fairly new invention, chances were that you only came across a website if Yahoo had indexed it or some kind soul had the grace of including the link in an email to you.

These days we have RSS readers, still a ton of links in emails, Reddit, Digg and all the other sites designed to help you sift through the countless news stories and blogs that enter our virtual consciousness every day and encourage you to go read it. Oh and there are email updates, news bulletins, special offers and whatever else pinging your in-box in addition to all the spam mail that you either have or have not successfully managed to filter out.

Invariably work also involves not only keeping track of a lot of people's opinions and concerns about any one thing you happen to be doing in addition to scouring the net for the latest research and findings on that topic as well as news headlines, analysis and more, which may help illuminate the topic and subsequently help you have some ideas or better still, make some decisions and help you prioritise whatever it is you are doing.

So what are the tools available to help you. Many and plentiful, all different and often not many that talk to one another. If you are like me and have to not only engage in business development, but also back up whatever you think/want/recommend with facts, figures and insights - you will have, much like me, developed a squirrel-like capacity to keep hoarding research and reports on a number of topics, because you know they will come in handy one day. I sometimes feel like the character Scrat from Ice Age, obsessively hunting insights in an organisation awash with them, but not always able to see what is right in front of its nose.

Frustration 1: Outlook
Now Outlook is one main pipeline through which things land into my consciousness. Sometimes its a mail from a colleague, another time its a question or enquiry, or it is a generous soul from somewhere else in the organisation who thinks the research they have just done could be of use to me. Invariably it always is, but seldom right away. So what do I do. I started saving everything onto the Desktop initially, into folders organised by topic. This because when I'm logging on remotely it's a pain to get hold of big reports and invariably sooner or later, I begin getting those annoying reminders that 'My inbox is over its size limit'. The trouble with this arrangement is that over time, the reports become harder and harder to find and more over, if there are many of them it is particularly annoying to keep looking through each one of them when I have a photographic memory of what the page I'm looking for had on it, but can't remember in what report that page is in. So over time, things end up in the bottom of your virtual pile, so to speak and you end up forgetting about them more often than not. Moreover - the reports also end up being separated from the mail from the person who sent it to you, which, in a large organisation can be a problem if their name is not on the actual report.

Frustration 2: Web Browsers
Invariably the majority of my computer use these days is spent with a web browser open. A lot of useful content can be found on websites, along with maps, graphs, photos, videos and so on. I began book-marking sites a long time ago and sooner or later had to reinstall my computer and lost all those bookmarks to my great indignation. Having learnt from my mistakes I then started backing up my bookmarks only to find that my bookmark lists just kept growing and what happened to them was a similar phenomenon as what happened to my research reports - they fell into the bottomless pit of bookmarks, where site names and links no longer can help remind me why I have book-marked that site in the first place, so without visiting it I won't know, but equally - I don't feel like aimlessly going through my bookmarks in search of the thing I can remember but can't find.

Frustration 3: On-line book-marking
Thinking I had found a clever way around my problem with browser bookmarks I jumped onto the on-line (social) book-marking wave and after trying out del.icio.us and a number of other sites with similar features I eventually settled for Netvouz, for no other reason really than I found it easier to search and find links here, I could choose whether to make my book-marked links private or public and it had a useful import feature from my web browsers. In fact it was really easy to get clicking away as I had the Netvouz bookmarklet installed as a button in my browser so before I knew it my bookmarks had grown to about 800. A similar phenomenon as what happened with my research and browser favourites began to happen, as (lazy as I am) I always ended up skipping the 'write a description here' of the link you are about to bookmark. Then a crucial thing happened. I got a new computer and alas, equipped with a completely fresh browser I had a heck of a time trying to remember what the book-marking service was called. All I could remember was the green and blue button I used to have installed on my old browser, which of course disappeared along with my old computer. Call me scatty, but after Googling the term 'social bookmarking sites' and ending up with a long list, the name Netvouz finally rang a bell and I was back there, then of course trying to remember what my password was, after over a year of having it in a shortcut along with a 'keep me logged in' cookie. So still stuck with the same problem, but this time not on my computer, but on a remote server.

So what to do. In fact I have been trying to get myself out of this conundrum for a while. With varying levels of success. Here's what I found.

Solution 1: Make presentations often!
This, albeit entailing a lot of work, is not altogether a bad idea - as it forces you to plough through all your research and notes and use what is usable and discard the rest. It's a valid excuse for going through your stuff, evaluating if you need more info and using what is relevant. If you are good, you embed links in your presentations so you can have those handy later when you wonder where that piece of information came from. So despite the benefits of this exercise forcing you to push your thinking and evaluate the knowledge you already have - yes, the downside is that it is incredibly time consuming and only worth while doing if there is someone desperately after that kind of condensed knowledge.

Solution 2: Keep a blog/Wiki of your ideas and to-do's that only you can see
This I thought would be a good way to keep growing a body of knowledge, as Wikis are easy to add to as and when you need to. There are also solutions out there that you can have running on your desktop or USB stick should you suddenly be out of luck with regards to an Internet connection. Services I have tried and like to varying degrees are PBWiki, free as all good things in life, TiddlyWiki which does the on-line/offline syncing business really well and you can lock it with a password too if you like and lastly Tiddlyspot, which hosts a variety of different iterations of Wikis for you to choose from, one particularly good one is the Monkey GTD, a Wiki version of the popular Getting Things Done methodology. Having tried all of these I can't say I didn't like them, but because they are in a browser and some are on-line, I did end up 'forgetting' about them slightly, as they seemed not so in your face as a desktop application would be. I don't know if this makes sense. Perhaps it is the fact that as they are all visible inside your normal web browser, you end up closing them by mistake or forgetting to save or whatnot, because you don't associate web applications with productivity software..? I'm guessing here, but despite my initial enthusiasm of using them, I did find that over time I forgot to go update them and also, adding images and videos was a sheer pain in the butt, not to mention sharing the content, if you didn't want to share it with the entire world. PBWiki allows you to give select access to people and create PDFs of stuff, but that's not good enough.

Solution 3: Make the Most out of Outlook
Forgive me, task lists - although a good invention, never capture the amount of detail I would like to remember. Besides you can't mix media in outlook unless you use the other Microsoft Applications to view them. A pain, and there are only so many things in life a calendar can help you do. When your job is to put together a document on why your company should do X instead of Y, then blocking out that time in your calendar only goes so far to actually helping you achieve that task. Here the important thing is not who you will be meeting with and for how long, but the sources that you may draw upon and notes to yourself in what order to approach the task. Here having a deeper content creation element would be useful.

Solution 4: Scrybe
I was very excited when I heard about Scrybe, an application that marries an on-line scratch-book with a calendar and reminder feature. In fact, I thought this would be the answer to my prayers, but after a week of fettling I can comfortably say that it is a glorified version of Microsoft Outlook. Yes, it allows you to copy parts of websites, add images and videos and so on. But here's the caveat: only if those elements are also on-line! What about all the crap sitting on your desktop? Forget about it. Also, really infuriating is the fact that more and more websites these days are made in Flash, and those images/visuals can't be captured into Scrybe's notebook. Not to completely trash Scrybe - it is a beautifully done calendar, something for Microsoft to learn from - but the bit I really wanted: the on-line scratch book is simply not versatile enough.

And the Winner? EverNote!
So the winner? Hard to believe really after all this ranting that there is an application I'm actually happy with. In fact more so for every day I use it. Evernote is genius in its simplicity. It has it's own database, which initially (annoyingly) installed itself into MyDocuments folder, which is out of bounds for me as soon as I'm not connected to the company's VPN, so after some juggling around I managed to get the database onto my desktop instead, where I can access it regardless of internet connection.

Evernote is free for the version that does pretty much everything apart from PDA syncing and hand-writing recognition, and installs handy buttons into Word, Outlook, Excel, FireFox and Internet Explorer, which allows you to select content (whether it be text, visuals or whatnot) and save it into Evernote and categorise it according to subject. There is also a universal clipper feature that covers all the other applications that don't have an Evernote button installed into them, in fact whatever you can copy and paste you can stick into Evernote. It is a truly remarkable application for its simplicity and adding online content couldn't be simpler. You copy a bit from a site you like, paste it into Evernote and Evernote automatically includes a link at the bottom to the page your note came from, should you want to go back for the full kaboodle one day. Did I mention you can search, set up to-do lists, jot down expenses, encrypt text, email notes to others and so on. It is soooo useful I can't believe it's taken this long to finally create a digital scrap book that can deal with both online and offline content in a way where you can still find stuff. Aah bliss. Go try it for yourself!

Comments

[Michael Griffiths]

I like Evernote - especially because it's free - but I moved to Microsoft OneNote after a while. It's essentially the same, but I found I preferred it.

Also, as I had a Tablet PC with OneNote, and Evernote charges for the Ink features, OneNote was actually "cheaper."

Might want to check it out for purely comparison purposes.

[toivo]

what about ...

http://www.google.com/notebook/

[Robert Westwood]

Thanks for the hint.

When I'm using KDE, then BasKet Note Pads (http://basket.kde.org/) perfoms a similar function.