When I started my new job, I made a decision to be as paperless as possible. Rather than being a conscious effort to be more green, my going paperless is mostly because I’m much better at keeping up with digital stuff than their physical counterparts. What’s more, whether it be a day, a week, or a year later, I’m much more likely to be able to find a digital file than something that only exists on paper.

But what to do with the files? Email lives on the server and in Outlook. Office documents, PDF’s, and the like live in folders on the hard drive. But what happens to all those little bits of information that don’t quite fit into the file paradigm? What about all those little scraps of information – website logins, notes about my wife’s favorite flowers, software serial numbers, web pages you want to keep for reference, etc – that don’t quite warrant their own file.

A place for all that extra stuff

In the past, I had been happily using Yojimbo as a place to store all that extra stuff. As a long-time Mac Guy, I loved Yojimbo’s combination of bare bones text editor, web page archiver, drop dock, and crazy good encryption. But with the new job came the realization that my mild-mannered, daylight-bound alter ego was destined to carry The Dreaded PC.

Faced with the need for cross-platform compatibility, I revisited that not-really old friend Evernote. A hit amongst the PC folks, Evernote had not, until recently, had a Mac version and therefore was of less interest to me than it perhaps could have been.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Evernote offers clients for both MacOS and Windows, as well as an online portal that serves as a central hub for all of your different clients. I’m not sure when all of this was put into place, but the combination of the free online account (40MB/mo storage space on the server) and the two desktop clients filled the void quite nicely, giving me a place to store all of those afore-mentioned scraps of information, pretty much guaranteeing that if I happened to forget my wife’s favorite kind of flowers, it wasn’t going to be because I didn’t have the information written down somewhere.

But wait, there’s more

Getting started in the new job meant a slew of “get to know you” meetings with different members of different teams. Since I knew there was no way I was going to keep it all straight in my head, I took copious notes. When in meetings I tend to write by hand into my trusty Moleskine notebook. Once back, those notes get transcribed into Evernote, where they are fully searchable and available to me on my PC, my Mac, through the web, or on my iPhone (more on the iPhone client later). Also, this means that at least 3 copies of my notes exist in 3 different places (I’m not sure whether the iPhone client stores a copy locally or not), thereby adding an additional layer of backup security.

So now whenever I need to jot down a note or two, I automatically bring up Evernote. A random thought about a project? Evernote. A question I need to ask someone? Evernote. A quick project outline? Evernote. Notes about a phone conversation? That’s right, Evernote.

In addition to simple text notes, I’ve taken to storing snippets of web pages that I find useful, whether they be work related or not. Most of this is done on the PC side, as the Mac web clipper leaves a bit to be desired in the relm of feature parity. The double-caps-lock hotkey comes in extremely handy at multiple times during the day.

Context context context

As any good GTD-er, I use a series of tags to denote type and context within my notes. I use the built-in Evernote tags to group together notes of a specific type (e.g. meeting notes). Within the note itself I’ll use text-based tags to mark action items (#ACTION), questions to follow up (#QUESTION), or ideas that require more thought (#THOUGHT).

Much like I do in Outlook and GMail, I then use a series of saved searches to help gather things together for later processing. In this way I’m free to take notes in a non-linear, go with the flow of the meeting way and then go back later and parse out the relevant information. And so long as I stick with my tagging conventions, I can have a relatively high degree of trust that I’m capturing all the things I’m meant to capture. For example, I use @ACTION to mark action items that pop up during the meeting.

Making the whiteboard digital … and searchable …

No corporate meeting would be complete without the whiteboard. Whiteboards are great for informal discussions and shoot-the-breeze ideas sessions. One problem I’ve always had is how to capture the stuff on the whiteboard. Either someone is tasked with taking notes, which effectively at least partially removes them from the discussion or you’re left to hurriedly scribble notes at the end of the meeting, which open you to the risk of missing things that have been erased in the interim.

Like a lot of people, I got into the habit of taking a picture of the whiteboard with my cell phone. I later emailed the picture to myself and then transcribed the notes into a text file for later reference. What’s more, I had to remember to give the picture a meaningful name and store it in a place I’m easily remember in case I ever needed to go back to it.

Evernote has taken a lot of those responsibilities off of me. During a meeting, I’ll open up the Evernote client and tell it to take a new picture (Snapshot Note). A quick tap of the shutter release and the phone goes back on the table while my attention turns back to the meeting. So long as I leave it running on the iPhone, Evernote will upload the picture directly to my web account where it will wait for my next sync from the PC or Mac.

The real coup here is that the Evernote server indexes all the text in my picture and makes it fully searchable. So as long as I remember to put the date and time somewhere on the whiteboard, I have a record of what transpired during the meeting. What’s more, if I write additional notes about the meeting its entirely by my choice rather than something I have to do to be able to reference my notes later.

Things I’d like to see in forthcoming version

I think Evernote is a stellar product for what I need. The combination of dump-and-search notes, searchable pictures, and multi-client sync make it incredibly compelling. Add to that the free price tag and its hard not to call this a winner. For that matter, at only $5/mo, the Premium Service is pretty much a steal.

At the same time, I have to acknowledge that the Mac and PC clients lack a little bit in feature parity. For future releases, some of the things I’d like to see include:

For the Mac

• A web clipper that doesn’t go through the Evernote website.
• A webpage archiver that faithfully reproduces the page, just like it looks in a web browser.
• A Quicksilver plugin that lets me search, create, or append text to notes.
• Import and export functionality.
• The ability to generate bulleted lists easily.

For the PC

• Combined view (see above Mac picture) – I know The Tape is Evernote’s “thing” and has been around since the early days, but I have to say that this is far and away the most distracting element of the PC client. I much prefer the combined view found in the Mac client and am really really really really really hoping the Evernote team decides to implement it in the near future on the PC client.
• Like the Mac, a web clipper that faithfully reproduces a web page as it appears in a browser window.
• A keyboard shortcut that will open a new note in its own window without launching/activating the main program window (CTRL-N followed by ALT-ENTER are the corresponding keyboard shortcuts; CTRL-ALT-N won’t open the note in a new window). I have an AutoHotKey script that does this automatically for me, but I’d love to see it become built in functionality.
• A plugin for Google Desktop or better yet Launchy, that lets me search my notes without having to launch the main program window.
• A way to efficiently silence the “Upgrade Now?” dialog boxes. I realize that Evernote is a Software-As-A-Service company and they’re not yet making any money off of me, but the dialog is intrusive and not easy to permanently disable (at least not for me, but perhaps I’m doing something wrong here).
• A preference that let’s me specify “don’t sync trash contents” or “empty trash before every sync” (or their converses) rather than making me interact with a dialog box before each sync.
• UPDATED: I’d like to see a bit more moderation in system resource usage.  It seems as though Evernote completely takes over my system and brings every other process to a near-screeching halt.  And this is after setting the indexing preference to its slowest setting and DISallowing indexing of images.  It’s a really great thing that I can index words inside of images, but perhaps it could leave me a bit more of my system to be able to get other things done.

Wrapping up

I don’t want people to think that I’m hating on Evernote; for my uses, Evernote offers a much-needed solution and fills a surprising void in this day and age where cloud and platform agnostic computing is all the rage. Sure, Google Notebook covers a lot of what I need, but I tend towards desktop based applications rather than those that live in a browser session. Also, GNotebook doesn’t do the image-to-searchable text thing that Evernote does.

As always, these posts aren’t meant to make you do things my way or to imply that you’re wrong for doing things your own way. They’re only meant to perhaps share some ideas on ways to get things done in a more flexible, more efficient manner. There are a bunch of GTD-centric productivity sites out there, each with a collection of great tips and tricks to make you more efficient in getting your work done. Whether you implement some of these suggestions or come up with some of your own, the idea is to always strive to work smarter, not harder.