Productivity workflow for busy Project / Product managers (part 2 – Evernote)
Introduction
The other tool that is an integral part of my workflow is Evernote (a note-taking software). I’ve been using it since 2016 and embraced the 2nd brain concept since. As my ex-colleague told me, the brain is for thinking, not for remembering. So why keep all the information in your head, when you can dump everything into Evernote and quickly find anything when you need it?
You may ask why do I need another tool if Todoist could work well for notes. In my books, Todoist and Evernote are like fork and spoon, each designed to accomplish in the most efficient way a specific goal. Briefly speaking, Todoist keeps the short-term information useful during a limited time span (complete a task and forget it). In contrast, Evernote keeps the long-term data not subject to expiration (write a book summary and reference to it 5 years later).
So let’s examine my knowledge management system in-depth.
The basics
The cornerstone of Evernote is notes – text documents that may contain photos, attachments, checkboxes, and other stuff. Notes can be organized via notebooks and tags. Do I need to mention that it is cloud-based and works on all major platforms?
Jot quick notes, add files, and search them when you need them. Sounds simple, but these capabilities are super powerful.
The premium stuff
The aforementioned basic stuff is greatly enhanced via not-so-obvious, but very cool features. The first one is OCR (optical character recognition). Evernote search can recognize the printed text on your photos and even handwriting. So you can take a photo of some document, add it to Evernote, and later find it via any word that the document contains.
Also, depending on the plan, Evernote provides 10 or 20 GB of storage every month without a monthly fee. Of course, such storage couldn’t be compared with Google Drive or OneDrive, but it is more than enough for saving documents, and it is yours forever without additional fees! Even if you decide to cancel your plan. Some people even go full paperless – they scan every document or receipt, dump it into Evernote, and then throw away the paper immediately.
Another area where Evernote shines is its web clipper. It allows saving web pages, articles, screenshots, and bookmarks with a couple of clicks. There is a cool option to save articles in an easy-to-read format stripping all the unnecessary website elements. You can also annotate and edit your screenshots to highlight or hide some important information.
Evernote can also look for text inside PDFs or office documents. Again, if you remember at least one word that the document contains, you can find it via a simple search.
The Evernote search itself is very flexible, designed to navigate thousands of notes, and supports advanced queries. For example, you can filter the search results to contain only a specific attachment file type, tag, or modification date. Another advanced feature is combined keywords via Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT.
My notebooks and use cases
Personally, I have 5 notebooks:
- Business – everything work-related: meeting agendas, meeting notes, plans, research results, files backups, and so on.
- Knowledge base – all the stuff that helps to advance my career: book notes, interesting articles, random PDFs, etc
- Kindle library – just a backup of all my work-related Kindle books in case I lose my device. I have a big collection with some rare items that I do not want to get lost. Also, I need to be able to access my books on any computer.
- Fitness – this one is self-explanatory: workout books and programs, wish list for my garage gym, scientific studies, etc
- Personal – a random dump of non-work related stuff such as random photos, software keys, certificates, quotes, coupon codes, bookmarks, unimportant passwords, list of friends and family birthdays, you name it.
Tip: don’t try to design a complex tags-notebooks-stacks structure from the start, just let your number of notes grow naturally, and with time you’ll notice patterns on how to organize them.