The Weekly Review

Evernote – The Perfect GTD App?

Admittedly, when the buzz for Evernote started to build early this year, I was skeptical. Could a company that designed applications for Windows suddenly create a good application for OS X? And the web? And mobile devices? I was very doubtful.

Early versions seemed to prove my doubts. Sure, there was some cool functionality, but the overall usability was terrible, especially with the Mac version. Add to this drawback the fact that Evernote offered no import/export functionality and it was clear to me that there was no point in switching from current tools. Even if Evernote offered some great features that most similar apps did not. So I kept plugging away happily with Yojimbo while keeping an eye on how things were progressing with Evernote’s metamorphosis.

As fall 2008 rolled around, a few Mac users I respect started mentioning the product a bit more. My curiosity was piqued once again. Then on October 1st, the Evernote blog announced that they had added import/export features, added scriptability on both the Windows and Mac clients, and launched a ServiceAPI as well. It was time to take a closer look at what Evernote had to offer.

Overview

For those who have been immersed in the culture of productivity and GTD—whether willingly or unwillingly—there is always the allure of the “perfect GTD application”. Despite the fact that no such creature has ever been sighted in the wild and has little to no proof of existence other than some shadowy old photographs, people from across the globe seem single-mindedly intent on the search for this urban myth.

Kidding aside, most GTD practitioners know that every person works a little differently and what is productivity Nirvana to one (wo)man is a discombobulated workflow to another. Pundits everywhere can praise this or that tool, but it’s up to each individual to decide what works best for them.

Having said that, there are some universal characteristics that can be an aid no matter how you work. Transparency, ubiquity, and flexibility are some examples. And if there ever was a tool that cleverly offered the majority of those characteristics, it may be worthy of the title “King of GTD”. The idea that best sums up what the Evernote Corporation is trying to accomplish is this: remember everything. And since David Allen’s entire methodology is bases on the premise of having a system that essentially does your remembering for you in order to free your mind to create and do—well, if Evernote can actually help you to remember everything, then it may just be the king of the GTD pile.

Here are the main features that are intended to help you remember.

Features

The big drawing point to this application has been the optical recognition. It’s really what draws Evernote apart from other applications in this genre. But there is more to this app—it’s packed full of features that together make a tantalizing package. Here’s a rundown on what Evernote has to offer.

Notes

The building block of Evernote, any type of data you want to save in the application lives within a note. There are no varying types of notes—rather, you insert various types of data within a note. Similar to other apps in this genre (Yojimbo, Together, Journler to name a few), Evernote accepts text, images, PDFs, and web archives. In this regard, it doesn’t do a lot more than it’s competition. But part of the allure of this tool is the varying ways it handles images and the text within those images. More on that later.

Evernote’s mantra is to never forget anything for you. Notes are your memories.

Notebooks

If notes are the building blocks of Evernote usage, than notebooks are the traditional method for organizing those blocks. If a user prefers the time tested method of organizing files on their computer into folders (email storage would be the same), then they will naturally take to using the notebooks feature to arrange their various notes.

Tags

Like any application that supports tagging these days, you can organize your content completely with the tags you create. Individual notes can be assigned keywords that are searchable. This is beneficial when you have related notes that are assigned to different notebooks.

Search

Again, with applications that make use of tagging, search is a key function. Evernote makes extensive use of search—in fact, everything you see in the application is a search. The most basic view is all notes from all notebooks. But that’s still a search, as indicated by the Search Explanation bar (which can be hidden via the View menu).

Above that, you can search on multiple criteria, such as tags, dates (created or updated), notebook name etc. The companies api PDF provides the full list of terms available via the search function.

Making use of the search functionality is essential to anyone with a large amount of notes. Combining tags and saved searches is a powerful way to organize your notes in ways that make sense to you and fit your workflow¹.

Encryption

Evernote claims that security and privacy are a priority and they have taken steps to provide just that. In an application that syncs across the Internet to a central data store from which all content is served, this is a no brainer. Anyone who wants to use Evernote as a complete replacement for a paper filing system would most likely feel this is an essential requirement. If you’re going to store files that contain bank account or social security information, you don’t want that information going across the wire in plain text.

But does the level of security Evernote currently provides enough to ensure the safety of private information? Unfortunately, not in my opinion². There are two issues that I can see.

First, currently you can only encrypt text within a note. That’s a good first step. This text is encrypted and only viewable on your local machine—it is not readable on the Evernote servers. Additionally, the password you use to unlock the encrypted text is not stored on the Evernote servers. But you cannot encrypt an image file or a scanned document. So scanning your financial statements into Evernote into a synced folder does not seem like an overly good idea. The data just is not secure enough.

This also brings to light my second issue. Evernote gives you the option to create local, non-synced notebooks. Any note saved to those notebooks is more secure as it will not be transmitted to the Evernote servers. However, what you gain in security, you lose in functionality. The text in the images or files contained in a note are not scanned by the Evernote servers and so the optical recognition feature is not available for that data. If you wanted to use the global search to include results from these folders, you would have to rely on tags, filenames etc. And of course, those particular notes are only available on the one computer where they were created.

Overall, perhaps this is good enough for most people. Having one computer that contains your sensitive data may be acceptable to some people who want to get rid of paper. And all the rest of your data is available to use the full functionality of the application.

Ubiquity

This is one of the key features of Evernote that has really gotten people’s attention and set this application apart from others. As a person who uses a Mac at home and Windows at work, Evernote has an advantage over my current tool, Yojimbo. Because Evernote has clients for multiple operating systems, I can access my data from both places. Not to mention that I can use my iPod Touch if need be.³

Having your data accessible across all devices and anywhere you have web access gives Evernote a decided advantage over it’s competitors.

Optical Character Recognition

Apart from their goal to be available everywhere you are, the main feature that has garnered so much attention is Evernote’s use of their OCR technology. Optical character recognition—what does this mean? It means that every note you create will be scanned by Evernote’s servers and every word of text will be stored away. Even those in photographs, screenshots or scanned documents.

Plenty of examples and scenarios are available all over the Internet, but here’s a couple that the Evernote product blog have demonstrated in the past:

1. You’re at a restaurant you’ve never frequented before and they have really good sushi. Snap a photo of the menu with your camera’s phone and add it to Evernote. Now whenever you have a hankering for sushi you can simply search for that word in Evernote.
2. You’re at a conference and you’ve met someone new that you’d like to work with in the future. Get his/her card and snap a photo. Add it to Evernote and now you’ll never forget the name or the face.

Stop and think for a few minutes and you’ll come up with more than few uses for this technology. I’ll discuss some more further down.

Import/Export

One of the factors that stopped a lot of intrigued people from switching to Evernote for a while was the fact that there was no way to get your data out of the application. Why spend hours moving all your stored information from a previous application into Evernote if you would never be able to make such a move again?

Well, as of October 1st, Evernote took steps in the right direction. Evernote corp added the ability to import/export content to and from their application. Unfortunately, the exported file is somewhat useless. It has a file extension of enex and appears to only be readable by Evernote itself. In my testing with Yojimbo, I was not able to successfully move my data from Evernote. I’ve heard the same complaint from others.

Hopefully, the Evernote team is listening to users and will take further steps to make the export functionality more usable. After all, even though you’re using their application, you want to feel like you own your data and can do with it as you wish.

Scripting

Another great addition was the support for scripting for both the Mac and Windows clients. Now for those who have the ability, users are able to access the data stored within Evernote from outside of the application. For Mac users, there could be some useful possibilities for apple scripts or automator workflows to extend the abilities of Evernote.

API

Although not really a feature, opening up a public API could have some interesting results. This gives a person the ability to access your central data store on Evernote’s servers without using the client application. You could create your own application/widget/web service that accessed the data itself without having it installed on your machine.

Now most folks won’t feel the need to recreate what Evernote themselves have already done, but there is the possibility of integrating access to a users Evernote data from another application. It wouldn’t be farfetched to see a scanning application that uploads documents directly to Evernote etc. The Evernote blog has already published some interesting integration examples.

Lastly, File Upload and Synchronization

The most recent update to this service is the ability to embed various types of files in any note and to have access to those files on any Evernote client. Obviously a useful feature for people needing certain files wherever they go. And the Evernote team took it a step further, allowing you to edit the file in the appropriate application and save your changes directly into the cloud.

Is it as good as Google Docs or online services like Dropbox? Being a recent update, the jury is still out here.

Putting it All Together

Now that we’ve looked at what functionality Evernote gives you, let’s look at how a person can put the application to actual use.

At Hand Paper Filing

I recently touched on this briefly. Evernote seems to be the best option to completely get rid of paper filing. It has the technology to make this possible—the ability to add photographs or scanned documents in the application, in addition to the OCR scanning would give a user the ability to find particular files exponentially faster than traditional paper filing.

Take every important piece of paper you may need in the future, scan it into Evernote and add metadata to your heart’s content.

Passwords

Because Evernote has the option to encrypt strings of text, you could conceivably store all your passwords and login information within the application. This is where the availability could be an asset—having your passwords available wherever you go is something a lot of people could appreciate. When out and about, your credentials would be available from your iPhone or any Internet connected computer.

Screenshots

There are a few options for screenshot sharing these days. Applications such as Skitch and LittleSnapper are aimed at this market. But Evernote could also play this role. You could use Evernote’s clipper or any other tool that takes screenshots and save the images to notes in Evernote. Setting up shared folders would enable you to give other people access to your screenshot library, similar to what the aforementioned tools give you.

Code Snippets

One great use for Evernote would be for a repository of code snippets. If your work requires consistent re-usage of certain pieces of code, it would be great to have all those small bits saved in an always accessible and well organized location.

Hard core programmers may use a more robust repository tool like Subversion or Github⁴, but if you dabble in these things, Evernote can be useful in this regard. I’m personally using it to store bits of php, css, apple script and xhtml code that I use frequently or need to revisit to remember what I did in a particular situation.

After all, that’s what Evernote was [re]created for.

Receipts

Another good use case is saving receipts. If you do any online shopping or banking, you probably want some sort of record of what you’ve done. When I pay a bill via my bank’s web site, I take a screenshot of the confirmation page. When I make an online purchase, I do the same for the receipt page.

Any financial transaction I make on my laptop is recorded in some way in Evernote.

Saved Searches (Smart Folders)

One last thing worth mentioning here is the saved searches functionality in Evernote. The same as OS X’s Finder or Mail.app give you, you can perform a search and then save the results. Evernote calls these simply Saved Searches. This feature gives you the ability to reference notes from across multiple notebooks that meet a particular criteria.

As with any tagging based application, the saved search function gives the user a lot of power and flexability.

These few examples are really just scratching the surface of what you can do with this app. Some apps do one thing and do it well. Some try to be everything for everybody. Evernote leans toward the latter, and you can see that a little imagination is going to take a person far with Evernote.

Task Management

One usage not mentioned above is that of task management. Anyone who’s spent a bit of their time reading about GTD or personal productivity can see that Evernote fits a lot of the criteria that people often look for with an information management application. Organizing reference information and project support material appears to be the perfect usage for this tool.

But what about managing your tasks themselves? A lot of people get fed up with GTD and similar systems because we often complicate our setups with multiple tools and processes. What if you could manage both your tasks and the related files and notes for all projects and areas of responsibility in your life? Sounds like a good thing, right? Tools like Backpack from 37signals include the same type of functionality.

We’ve looked at the various ways Evernote can help you with your information. In addition, you have the ability to create tasks. To do so, simply click the “Insert To-Do Checkbox” button on the toolbar. Okay, you can create tasks … but what does that give you? Well, you can create multiple tasks in one note and you can create tasks in any one note. Beyond that, the only other thing you can do is search for tasks.

In the source list on the left, there is a category labelled Attributes. Expanding this list shows various attributes you can use to search for content within all your notes. One of those attributes is labelled To Do and it it breaks down further to Completed, Not Completed and All. Clicking on these options will give you every note with a To Do that fits the criteria indicated.

So … is this useful?

I say it depends on the person. If you crave for or need to be able to organize tasks into lists regardless of project, Evernote isn’t going to get it done for you. Tools like Things or OmniFocus may be a better fit. But if you tend to work with your tasks simply grouped by project or area, maybe this kind of setup could work for you.

People who are familiar and comfortable with the aforementioned Backpack could use Evernote as a cheaper alternative. In Backpack, you organize everything by pages and each page can contain multiple types of information, including to-do lists. Notes in Evernote can work the same way. Files, to-do lists, images and text can all exist within one note.

Or you could create a notebook for each project/area. Or you could tag all your notes and used saved searches to organize them …

If there’s one thing Evernote has in spades, it’s flexibility. And when it comes to aiding your productivity, whether managing your tasks or reference materials only, Evernote is effective.

Most often, when an application is designed to be everything to everybody, it fails miserably. When Evernote started making moves in this direction, I was planted firmly with the detractors. But after three months of using the application, I have hope. The company seems to be making a lot of the right moves. And while there are still some strong criticisms, the evolution of the product across multiple platforms has been what I would consider successful to date.

Overall, the UI for the Mac client has improved in leaps and bounds. It still has glitches as well, but based on what we’ve seen improve over the past year, I have confidence these niggling issues will be resolved.

The one area that remains as a major concern to me is data security. Evernote is being built to be a capable replacement for the paper in your life. But does it have the security measures in place to make it safe to use it this way? I doubt it does and so, as much as I’d like to be completely paperless, I won’t be scanning in all my government or bank documents anytime soon.

Bottom line then—although still beta software, Evernote is a better option than the other products of this type. I switched from Yojimbo and have not looked back once.((That’s not to say Yojimbo is not a great product—it is. But Evernote is simply better and I haven’t had many of those moments where I thought, “I wish Evernote did [this] like Yojimbo does.”)) Evernote meets a lot of my needs and it’s with me wherever I go—home, work and everywhere wifi is available. And it’s free.

It’s a package that’s hard to beat.

1. As with any software application that supports tagging, it can take some time to change your habits [↩]
2. But I am by no means an expert when it comes to the security of digital information. So far my personal comfort levels are this—if I am worried about any type of information, I keep it local. To illustrate, I have scanned banking and payroll statements into a local, non-synced folder in Evernote. [↩]
3. Or any mobile unit that can access the Internet. [↩]
4. I can’t say for sure as I’m not a hard core programmer [↩]