Evernote, Omnifocus, and my productivity

Over the past several years my job here at Cisco Talos has changed drastically.  I took on new roles, which is awesome and exciting, but in the process while trying to organize and create process and clarity for my team and those that work with my team, I lost my personal productivity.  Something I've written about extensively on this blog.

I shifted from Evernote (which I've been using forever, as readers of this blog will know) to Notes.app, and from Omnifocus (Also have been using it forever) to Reminders.app, all in an attempt to reduce the amount of 3rd party apps I had installed on my laptop, iPad, and iPhone and use a "native Apple experience".

I quickly outgrew them both.   I found out that Notes really tops out at around 2000 notes, then it becomes basically nonfunctional. My notes are not your typical Apple Notes.app "jot down a few things" type Notes though.  I've had a lot of people tell me that Notes handles their notes fine.  My notes have attachments, drawings, photos, complex formatting, etc.  I have thousands and thousands of notes.  I just don't think Notes.app could handle it.  Another feature I missed: Notes doesn't allow you to "Tag".  I can arrange my notes by topic, much like the "Notebook" feature in Evernote, but I can't "tag" something in Notes.app.

For example, how I use this in Evernote, and I'll touch on this later as well...  let's say I am going to a conference.  I get the agenda for the conference, my flights, my receipts, my notes, my meetings, everything that I am doing at the conference, I tag it something that represents the conference.  For example, my tag for "CiscoLive United States" is "clus".  I can find everything regardless of Notebook or arrangement with that tag.   I could compensate for this in Notes.app with something like #clusat the top of the note, and that worked for awhile, but as I said earlier, Notes.app's searching at thousands-of-notes scale is ridiculously slow, and let's not get started with the frustration of syncing across devices.

More on searching...  Notes can find text in a PDF or a Doc, that's fine, but it doesn't show you where in the PDF the text was.  Notes also doesn't do a good job of searching handwritten notes.  Something I do a lot of on my iPad. (I'll get to this later with my comments on Notability and Penultimate.)

As for Reminders.  It doesn't do any nesting of actions, vital to how I work in Omnifocus.  Plus I had a bunch of Applescripts that organized and automated things for my in Evernote and Omnifocus, and I had to rewrite some of them to deal with Reminders and Notes.  Things like being able to simply tap a keystroke, which prompts an entry box so I can create myself a reminder very quickly.  Omnifocus has this natively.  Reminders.app, I had to find one (or write one, I honestly don't remember which at this point)  btw --  here it is.

tell application "System Events"

display dialog"Create a new reminder" default answer"" cancel button"Cancel" giving up after 20 with icon path to resource "Reminders.icns" in bundle(path to application "Reminders")

set reminTitle to text returned of result

tell application "Reminders"

set newremin to make new reminder

set name of newremin to reminTitle

end tell

 end tell

If you use Reminders, and you want to steal that and make a keyboard shortcut that calls that AppleScript (if you use Reminders.app) feel free.

So, after using this new system for awhile, I found out it was a disaster, and in the past two weeks I have dedicated significant amounts of time to get back to my happy place where things were productive.

So, I'm back to using Evernote and Omnifocus again, and I am going write a few posts on how I've developed a system the works for me with these three tools.  Consider this.. part one.

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Is Evernote going away?

Evidently we don't know if Evernote is sticking around, since there seems to be some panic on the internet about it today.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/05/evernote-might-be-in-trouble-so-heres-how-to-get-your-notes-out-of-it-completely-and-safely

It is really easy to move your notes out of Evernote and into Notes.app on the Mac.  (Click the above link for the easy instructions.

However, if you use Hazel, to say, monitor the "Downloads" folder on your Mac, and if any files show up there (like a PDF for example) and you want to have it automatically saved to Notes.app.  (This is handy after you try it).

I wrote a little AppleScript to do this for you, (in Hazel) since I couldn't find one on the Internet, and it wasn't rocket science:

tell application "Notes"

set mynote to make new note at folder "PDFS"

make new attachment at mynote with data theFile

end tell

If you have a folder in Notes.app called "PDFS", it will create a new note in the folder for each file and attach the file to it (which for me, then syncs it with iCloud so the file is on all my devices). Pretty handy.

Anyway, putting this here in case any one else can use it.

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A friend and his Evernote installation

Evernote. The thing that has saved my sanity, and countless trees around the world to prevent things from being printed out. The ubiquitous capture tool. Anything you want to remember, on the computer, in voice, in pictures, darn near everything you can put into a digital device can be recorded into this tool.

I use it for many things. I keep track of projects in them. Information for a hotel that I need to stay at? In Evernote. Webpage I need to remember? In Evernote. Notes that I take on the back of a napkin? Evernote. Pictures of things I need to remember? Yup.

Friend of mine Jim recently blogged about all the goodness that helps him in Evernote, and he posted it on his blog. Be sure and read his post too.

Now, Evernote seems like one of those tools that you download, use a couple times and forget about. But, let me encourage you. You use it. Use it to remember one certain project or something. Put all your notes for that project into Evernote, and you'll realize that you want to start using it more. Then more, then more.

Eventually you'll get to the point where it becomes a part of your everyday life. It becomes your filing cabinet, your todo system..

It's free. You start off using it to remember things about projects, saving webpages to it, saving PDFs inside the program. Using your Evernote client to push all your information you need to remember to one location. One location you can access on your Blackberry, the iPhone, the Web, your Desktop... Then you wind up wanting to put EVERYTHING in there, as I do. Word Documents, Xcel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations..

I recently did a project that spanned several months, I had to write a big paper and a presentation. I had to coordinate across Sourcefire in several departments, and had to take a bunch of notes. Evernote allowed me to keep it all in one place, simply.

http://www.evernote.com/

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