Category: GTD

new Evernote pricing and plans

Evernote announced new plans and pricing today. In a nutshell, there’s a new “plus” plan for $25/year, and the “premium” plan is now $50/year. The old premium plan was $45/year, so that’s a fairly minor increase. My premium subscription is up in early 2016. Rather than renew, I’ll probably switch to the “plus” plan, as it seems to be more than adequate for my needs.

I’ve known for a while that they were likely to make some pricing changes this year, but wasn’t sure what they were going to do. I was a little bit afraid that they might decide to make their premium plan $99/year or something like that. I’m glad to see that they haven’t bumped it up too much, and have actually added a cheaper plan that should be more than enough for many people.

taxes and reminders and things

I’m proud to say that my taxes are done, and February isn’t even over yet. (OK, I’m using an accountant now, and not doing them myself, but I’m still proud. I had to get all my paperwork together, make an appointment, show up for the appointment, etc. Yes, it was more work when I did the taxes myself, but it’s still work.)

I’m going to need to pay (federal and state) estimated taxes for 2015, though, and I’m worried that I’m going to forget one or more payments. I’d like to just set up scheduled payments through my bank or something like that, but I’m not sure that would work out. I’m sure the bank would send the money to the IRS (and State of NJ), but I’m not sure it would get credited right without the proper form attached. The IRS has something called EFTPS for electronic payments, but I don’t think I can just schedule all four payments at once and forget about it. (And I’m not sure I trust an IRS-run web site…)

So I think I’m going to have to use some kind of fancy electronic reminder system for this. A while back I mentioned that I’d been messing with Gneo and Things. Well, I pretty much gave up on both of them, and I’m just sticking with Evernote reminders for my “fancy reminder” needs. I’m sure I can create reminders for the estimated tax payments in Evernote, but I still kind of feel like I should be doing something fancier.

I’ve been listening to the Mac Power Users podcast a lot lately, but they still haven’t quite talked me into trying out OmniFocus, the fanciest of GTD / task management / reminder systems. I’m probably over-thinking this. I should just write down “pay estimated taxes” on the appropriate days on my Doctor Who wall calendar, and I’ll be fine.

2014 Year in Review and 2015 Goals

By many measures, 2014 was a horrible year for the world. Dave Barry wrote a fairly amusing (and somewhat depressing) year in review article for the Washington Post. And Charlie Booker wrote a similar article, from a UK perspective, for the Guardian. Bill Gates has a fairly upbeat take on 2014 though. All three of those articles are worth reading, if you want to get some perspective on the past year.

Personally, I think I had a pretty good year, though things were pretty static, and I didn’t make as much progress as I would have liked on some fronts. But I did a really good job with my weight loss goals, and with some other stuff.

I wrote a relatively short year in review post last year. This year’s post is going to be pretty long. I’ve had a lot of this stuff banging around in my head for the last few weeks, and I really want to get it down in writing, partly so I have it to refer back to in a year, and partly just so I can organize my thoughts and move forward.

Weight & Health
I started a diet in September 2013, at 230 pounds. I got down to 200 lbs as of January 1, 2014. I hit 165 about a month ago, and have been hovering around there, +/- 3 lbs, since then. So I think I’ve done a generally good job on this front.

For 2015, I’m not sure if I want to just maintain at 165 or set a new goal for 160. I don’t see much point in trying to go any lower than 160. I should probably switch gears in 2015 and try to work a bit harder on fitness. Through most of 2014, until it got cold, I was going out for walks almost every day. I think that really helped get the pounds off. I definitely want to pick up on that, when the weather gets warmer. Until then, I’m not sure what I want to do. But I know I should be doing something. My neck and shoulders have been bothering me a bit recently, so maybe I need to do something about that before I try to do anything new on the exercise front. I tried using my exercise bike a bit in 2014, but I’ve found that my back starts bothering me after about five minutes on the bike. So I probably need to figure that out before I can get any further with the exercise.

Education / Programming
I made an attempt to get through Algorithms I and II on Coursera in 2013. I got most of the way through part one, and never started part two. In 2014, I took another shot at part one, but gave up when I got sick not long after the course started. I never got back to it. I’m still interested in doing something with Coursera and/or EdX in 2015, but I don’t have any particular plans.

On a couple of other fronts, I did manage to learn a bit about WordPress and F# in 2014. I read two books on WordPress, one general and one on plugin development, and I successfully moved my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress install. So that was an accomplishment. I didn’t actually do any meaningful WordPress development, though, aside from tweaking a few things in my template, and working through some of the examples in the plugin dev book.

On F#, I started reading a few books on the subject, but didn’t finish any of them. I learned enough to solve a few Project Euler problems with F#, but not enough to do anything really useful with the language.

Speaking of Project Euler, I had solved through to problem 25 at the end of 2013, and I’ve now solved through to # 65, so that’s 40 problems solved in 2014. I used C# for all of the problems I solved, and reworked a handful of them with F#. For 2015, I’d like to continue working on Euler problems, using a combination of C# and F#.

I’m not sure if I want to try to learn any new languages in 2015. I think I want to concentrate on C# and F# for now. It might be nice to learn Swift, and get back to doing some Mac and/or iOS development, but I don’t have any particular plans to do so. If possible, I’d like to get back to doing some web development using some of the new stuff around ASP.NET that I really didn’t get a chance to play with in 2014.

Work
I started my job at SHI in January 2013, so I’m now just about to hit the two-year mark. Things were pretty static with SHI in 2014. I worked almost exclusively on Dynamics AX projects, using X++. I did a smattering of C# work, but only to support stuff I was doing in X++. The one big thing that changed, early in 2014, was a reorganization, so I’m now under a different boss than I was in 2013. But the new boss was already my project manager, so there wasn’t really much of a change there.

During my year-end review for 2013, there was some talk about the possibility that I might be getting involved in a SharePoint project, but nothing ever came of that. I did read an introductory SharePoint development book, but I never got as far as even setting up a local environment to play around with. If I learned anything about SharePoint, it was mostly that it’s a mess, and trying to learn it, in a general way, on your own, probably isn’t a great idea. If the SharePoint project resurfaces in 2015, I’ll definitely jump back in, but I’m not going to mess around with SharePoint any more without some specific direction.

I haven’t had my 2014 review yet, so I’m not sure what will come out of that. The boss has talked, in general, about some upcoming changes, but hasn’t gotten into specifics. I’m cautiously optimistic about things at SHI, but we’ll see what comes out of my review, and what kind of changes occur this year.
One specific thing she did mention was that we’ll have a training budget this year, so that might be good. She didn’t mention how much the budget was, or what it might be spent on, so I’m not getting my hopes up about going to any tech conferences on the company dime, but hopefully it’s not just a $500 budget that gets spent some CBT software or something like that.

Consulting and/or Volunteering
I haven’t done any consulting work at all in 2014. I’m OK with that, though it would have been nice to have done at least one independent project.

I signed up for Catchafire in 2014, in the hope of finding a good volunteer programming project to work on. But I never did find anything there that I thought would be a good match for my skills and my interests. I’ll keep an eye on it in 2015, but maybe I should look around for other opportunities.

I also applied for volunteer positions at a few museums in NYC, including the Met, The Morgan, and the Museum of Natural History. The only one I heard back from was the Morgan, but they needed someone who was available on weekdays, so that was out. I’ll keep an eye out for volunteer opportunities in 2015, but I’m not hopeful that I’ll find anything interesting that would actually fit into my schedule.

Reading
According to Goodreads, I finished 30 books in 2014, but most of them were comics. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) I read The Strain trilogy at the beginning of the year, then spent the rest of the year slowly working my way through Kate Elliot’s Spirit Gate. So I can’t really say I read any fiction over the past year that wasn’t just escapist fantasy. (Again, not that there’s anything wrong with that!) For non-fiction, I read through two books on WordPress, started (but didn’t finish) a couple of F# books, and recently started David Allen’s Making It All Work. I’ll likely finish the David Allen book this month.

I don’t have any specific reading goals for 2015, though I’d like to read more non-fiction, and I definitely have a lot of comics I’d like to read, when I can find the time. But I’m not setting any real goals.

Blogging
I moved this blog to WordPress in May, and I’ve been pretty happy about that. I think it worked out well, and I learned a lot about WordPress in the process.

I wrote a little over 100 posts in 2014, including a few that were actually useful enough to attract a few page views, so that’s good. I only had 33 posts in 2013. (I’m still not making any money on AdSense though. I might just remove ads entirely this year, since they don’t seem to be doing me any good.)

I think I want to keep going with WordPress, and I’m happy enough with 1&1 that I think I’ll stick with them as a host. I might mess with the template a bit in 2015, but I don’t think I need to.

Travel
I didn’t really do any travel in 2014, aside from several trips into NYC, and one trip to Georgia for a funeral. Most of the trips into NYC were day trips, but I did go to WordCamp NYC over the summer, and stayed in the city for that. I made several visits to the Met and MoMA over the past year, so I’m pretty happy about that. The trip to Georgia was not a happy one; my brother’s best friend passed away.

I didn’t make it to even a single comics convention in 2014, so I’d like to try and get to either San Diego or NYCC this year. Or maybe I should consider WonderCon in Anaheim. I know the chance of getting SDCC tickets is low, but I’ll give it a shot, when they go on sale. And I’m sure I can get NYCC tickets, if I don’t wait until the last minute like I did last year.

Hardware
I recently swapped out the hard drives in my ThinkPad and MacBook with SSDs. I re-installed Windows 8.1 on the ThinkPad several months ago, and wiped & reinstalled OS X on the MacBook as part of the SSD switch. So both of those machines are clean, speedy, and up to date. I think I’ll keep both of them through 2015.

I am currently in the middle of doing a clean install of Windows 8 on my desktop machine. I’m hoping that works out, but I have some doubts. I don’t really want to have to replace that machine this year, but I might have to. I’ll think about that some more once I’ve got it all set up.

I got a new iPhone 5s in October 2013, so I’m going to stick with that through most of 2015. I might replace it at the end of the year, or I might wait until 2016. And I only just recently picked up an iPad Air, so I shouldn’t need to replace that until 2016, I hope.

Apartment and Car
I think I’m going to renew the lease on my current apartment again this year. I keep thinking about moving, but I can never quite talk myself into it. I’ll need to review my thinking on that this month, since I’ll need to make a decision on the lease in February. I do have a lot of stuff that I want to get cleaned up and/or fixed in the apartment this year, assuming I stay in it. Some of that will require some action from the landlord, which I’m not optimistic about, but I’ll make an effort, and see how far I can get.

And I’m hoping to keep my car through 2015. It’s got about 65,0000 miles on it and it’s running well. I just need to keep up with maintenance on it, and I think I’ll be fine.

Personal Organization
I made a number of changes in my systems for personal organization in 2014, and I’m pretty happy with the direction I’m going in on that. I got all of my passwords moved from KeePass to 1Password. And I consolidated all of my personal notes into Evernote, and canceled my old Backpack account. I’ve been making a concerted effort to reapply myself to following the general principles of GTD, and have managed to get a lot of random stuff done in the last few months.

Summary
Well, that was a pretty long post. Probably longer than it needed to be, but I feel like I’ve worked some stuff out and cleared some stuff out of my head. Happy New Year!

Inbox (almost) zero, x4

I always like to post something when I get my inbox to zero. (It only happens once every couple of years.) Right now, I’ve got my work inbox down to almost zero, and my three personal accounts also down to almost zero. So this may be the first time that *all* my accounts have been completely processed.

I’ve been doing fairly well at keeping my work email inbox down to a manageable size. We have a pretty typical Exchange/Outlook setup, and most of my work falls neatly into project folders, so I just file stuff away in those, and use Outlook follow-up flags to keep track of next actions. And I keep project notes in OneNote, with next actions generally marked in there if they’re not already marked in Outlook. (I use OneNote rather than Evernote at work, since our setup is fairly Microsoft-centric.)

On the personal side, I’m trying to use GMail for all my important mail now. I have a couple of other accounts that were still getting a fair bit of important mail, but I finally cleared that up so that nearly everything is coming into GMail now. Also, I was being fairly inconsistent on the ways in which I was flagging stuff in GMail, sometimes “starring” stuff that I needed to follow-up on, and sometimes applying “Action” and “Waiting For” labels. And then, I wasn’t really following up on either the stars or the labels consistently. Well, I’ve now un-starred everything, and either assigned an appropriate label or processed the starred message. And I’ve gone through the labeled messages and cleaned up all the old ones, so there are now only a few tagged messages, and they’re all recent.

Now, I’m trying to think of ways to *keep* my GMail account clean. First, I’m going to avoid using the “star” feature. It’s easy to fall into the habit of using the “flag” button in the iOS mail app, which translates to a star in GMail. But I’ve been flagging too much stuff that way, and never really going back and reviewing it, to figure out if it’s actionable or not. So I’m going to try to consistently use my “Action” label for stuff that requires an action on my part, and “Waiting For” for stuff that I need to wait on someone else for. And I really need to start reviewing those labels on a weekly basis and clearing them out.

I think it’s actually going to be much easier to keep my GMail inbox clean, given some of the changes I’ve made, and some of the stuff I’ve cleared up. I’ve unsubscribed from several mailing lists, so there will be less cruft to sort through initially. And I’ve set up a few new filters to sort out some stuff into a “Read/Review” label. (I’ve had that label in place for years, but hadn’t been keeping up with my filters, so a bunch of stuff wasn’t getting tagged automatically.)

My big challenge, which I’m still thinking about, is how to manage the various notices I get relating to statements that I need to download. I still get my important bills on paper (credit cards, bank statements, cable & utility bills). But I get only email notification on several other accounts (401(k), EZPass, etc.), which I then need to download, in PDF form usually, from a web site. This has proved to be a challenge for me; I tend to put it off for months. It’s not really a big deal, since there’s rarely anything earth-shattering on my 401(k) statement, or my EZPass statement. But I’d really like to get in the habit of downloading and reviewing these more often. And I’d like to switch some other statements over from paper to PDF, if I can get things to where I can trust myself to download them on a timely basis.

FileThis is an interesting service that will download statements for you, and deposit them into your Dropbox account (or Evernote, or several other places). But, it does this by using your web credentials to log into your accounts, so you have to hand over your user names and passwords to them, and that’s pretty scary. And they don’t say much about this on their site, but I’d guess that I’d have to turn off two-factor authentication on any accounts I use them for, since I don’t see how they could possibly deal with that on their end.

I haven’t found any other good ways to automate this stuff. So, sadly, I think I need to continue to download statements manually. I just need to figure out how to do it more frequently and more consistently. My plan, for now, is to consistently mark the emails relating to this stuff with an “Action” label, and follow up on those emails at least once a month. I’m going to reinforce that with a recurring reminder in either Evernote or the iPhone Reminders app. If I can get in the habit of doing that, maybe I can switch some more stuff over from paper to PDF.

wrapping up the weekend

Well, I got a lot done this weekend, Friday and Saturday. But I’ve spent most of the day today moping around the apartment and napping, since I now have a cold. Darn. I was really on a roll for a while there.

I have, though, finally gotten all of my old notes out of Backpack and into Evernote, and closed down the Backpack account. I’m still ruminating on whether or not I want to try managing all my tasks in Evernote, or if I want to try using a second app to help with that. I downloaded a trial version of Things, and messed around with it a bit, but I don’t think it’s what I need. For now, I’m just going to keep using the Reminders app on my iPhone for simple reminders, and I’ll keep project lists in Evernote.

Thanksgiving weekend

I spent Thanksgiving day with a friend’s family. It was a good day, but pretty loud and chaotic, which is to be expected when you put sixteen people (including three small children) together in a house on Thanksgiving.

I spent Black Friday home alone, working on some personal organization. I almost managed to update the map on my TomTom GPS, but hit a snag when the new map was too large to copy to the device. That led me on a wild goose chase that ended when I found a notice on the TomTom site that said they were aware of the problem and working on a solution. But it was a fair amount of wasted time. (I’d thought, at one point, that maybe they’d purposely made the new map file just a little too large, to force people with older devices to upgrade to newer ones, but apparently it was an honest mistake.)

I also continued my work on getting stuff out of Backpack and into Evernote. I’m almost done there, and I should be able to close down the Backpack account soon. I’m getting enough stuff into Evernote now that I’m starting to think about how I’m organizing things, and what kind of adjustments I should make. I read the book Evernote Essentials yesterday, and also listened to a podcast with a lot of Evernote tips, so I could hopefully stimulate my brain a bit and come up with some good ideas on how to best use Evernote. I found both the book and the podcast helpful, though there weren’t any earth-shattering revelations in either of them.

I had a page in Backpack titled “GTD”, and I was using it to keep, basically, GTD-related lists, like a “someday/maybe” list, a “waiting for” list, project lists, and stuff like that. But I stopped doing anything resembling a weekly review quite some time ago, and I haven’t really been keeping up the lists. So, for instance, one list item was to use a $10 Best Buy Reward Zone certificate before it expired… in 2011. So I’m not entirely sure how best to clean up and re-structure those lists in such a way that I’ll be more likely to use them.

I really like the general idea of consolidating as much stuff as I can in Evernote, and cutting down on complexity a lot, eliminating OneNote, Backpack,  DevonThink, and whatever else I can. But I also noticed that Things for iPhone and iPad is free this weekend, and the Mac version is 30% off. So maybe keeping my GTD stuff in Things would be a good idea, while using Evernote for reference material and archives. But Things doesn’t have a PC version, or a web version, so I’d only be able to access it on the Mac and iOS. Which probably isn’t really a problem, given the way I’m using my computers these days. (Also, “Things” is a horrible product name, and tends to produce a lot of irrelevant (but amusing) results when Googled.) I’ve already downloaded the iPhone and iPad versions, and have played around a bit, and like what I see. I’m planning on downloading the trial version of the Mac software today, so I can see if it’s going to work for me or not.

Meanwhile, I just ordered two 500GB Samsung SSDs, for $189 each, with the general idea of replacing the old-fashioned drives in my MacBook and ThinkPad. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now, and I kept putting it off. But I keep hearing, over and over, from friends and random internet sources, about how much difference an SSD will make, so I finally had to go ahead and do it. So next weekend’s project will likely be replacing either the MacBook or ThinkPad drive. Or possibly both, if I have enough time.

I’m also thinking about going to NYC to see The Imitation Game, the new movie about Alan Turing. I don’t think I’ll talk myself into doing that today, given how cold it is outside right now. But maybe tomorrow, if it’s a little warmer.

a bit more on Evernote

I’m making good progress with my efforts to consolidate all my notes into Evernote. All of the notes from OneNote on my desktop PC have been copied over or deleted. And I’m working through my Backpack notes.

I’m still thinking about whether or not Evernote is a good choice for the long term. There’s some interesting stuff in this recent article from The Guardian.

Stuff I like:

  • “We don’t data-mine your information, we’re not selling you to anyone. Our fundamental belief is that we make money when our users say ‘we love this product and we want to pay for it’.”
  • “It takes longer to get started, but ultimately it gives us a shot at building a 100-year startup.”
  • “If a third-party developer makes something great that gives people a great experience, we make more money. Other companies have this love-hate relationship with developers. For us it’s just easy: it’s love.”

Stuff that I’m maybe a little worried about:

  • “We’re about work. Last year we made the decision to really focus on work. We don’t really talk about Evernote [as something] for your hobbies any more.”
  • “We’ve never changed our price: we launched seven years ago at $5 a month, but we realised a couple of years ago that it was the wrong price.”

So, basically, I’m glad to see that they’re thinking long-term, and trying to monetize via paid subscriptions rather than selling info to advertisers, and I’m glad to see that they’re still supportive of third-party developers. But I’m a little concerned that they’re focusing on business rather than personal use, and that they may be mucking with the subscription price next year.

Evernote for Mac 6

I’ve been making steady progress on my project to consolidate all my notes into Evernote. As I’ve said before, there are a few things that I don’t like about Evernote, but I’ve decided that it’s the best solution for my needs.

Last night, I got the usual client software upgrade pop-up on my Mac; Evernote updates their client pretty frequently, so that’s generally not too exciting. But in the release notes this time, I saw that it was a major version upgrade (5.x to 6.0), and the top item in the feature list was “Sleek new design inspired by OS X Yosemite.” I groaned a bit, but went ahead with the upgrade.

The new version is, indeed, more Yosemite-like, with diminished contrast between foreground and background, making it harder for old folks with poor eyesight like me to use. I’m having the same problem with 1Password.

There’s a good overview of the upgrade at MacStories. Other than the unfortunate Yosemite-inspired design changes, the client still works fine, and they didn’t make any unnecessary changes to keyboard shortcuts or anything else that would affect my ability to use the software productively, so that’s good. (When did we get to the point where the main thing I hope for in a software upgrade is that they don’t make it too much harder to use, though? Was it the Office ribbon? The all-caps menus and horrible color scheme changes in Visual Studio 2012? iOS 7? But I digress.)

I’m also not terribly excited about the new features they’ve added to Evernote recently. Over the last few versions, they’ve added a presentation mode, work chat, and now “context“. None of those things really helps me use the software for its main purpose — taking notes and organizing them. But they’re easy enough to ignore. (I’d be even happier, of course, if they’d let me remove the buttons for these features, so I could use the space more effectively.)

And I’d be really happy if programs like Evernote and 1Password would introduce options in their software to switch to an alternate color scheme, like Visual Studio did after enough people complained about VS 2012’s default color scheme.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering if messing with the system font on my Mac will make things easier to read or harder. I want to try out Fira and Input. While replacing the system font probably isn’t something Apple wants you to do, it’s simple enough and appears to be easily reversible, so I might as well try. (I miss the old days, when you could use a tool like Kaleidoscope to change practically everything in the UI!)

rearranging the deck chairs

I’ve been working on a few things lately to improve the way I keep things organized. I’ve already blogged about my move from KeePass to 1Password. I’m also working on consolidating all my personal notes in Evernote. And I spent some time this weekend cleaning up my GMail inbox, and reviewing my use of OtherInbox Organizer, and thinking about whether or not I want to keep using that.

All of this “work,” when viewed from a certain perspective, looks a bit like pointless busy work, “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” as it were. GMail, for instance, gives me enough space that I really don’t ever need to delete an email. And the search tools in GMail are good enough that I really don’t need to categorize anything, if I don’t want to. If I need an old email, I can probably find it in a few seconds with no problem. Evernote is almost as good. The limits on even a free account are generous enough that I’m not going to hit them, and the search is good enough that I can find stuff quite easily, regardless of how little I’ve bothered organizing things.

But there is a real point to smoothing out the kinks in the system, reviewing old notes, and cleaning up old cruft. It’s a way of reviewing my own recent history, maybe seeing some patterns that I didn’t notice before, or remembering projects that I had abandoned but would like to pick back up, or sweeping away old projects that aren’t relevant or interesting to me anymore. And, even if none of that mattered, it’s still something to do that just makes me feel a little better about myself and my control over my own life, so it’s worth it just for that mental benefit, even if it’s fleeting and possibly illusory.

So, having said all that, I’m now going to bore anyone still reading this with some details on what I’ve been doing. First, with 1Password, I am now about 80% of the way through moving everything over from KeePass. I have the iOS, Mac, and Windows clients all installed and running, and the Firefox extension installed on my Mac & Windows machines. I’m not sure if I’m entirely happy with the Firefox extension, and its ability to automate logging in to a site; it seems to get that wrong most of the time. That’s probably something I can straighten out with some more work, though I’m not sure if it’s worth spending too much time on it.

With Evernote, I’m trying to convince myself that I can use it to replace Backpack, and I want to try and consolidate all of my random notes from various other systems into Evernote. Backpack is a product that has been pretty much retired by 37signals. They still keep it running for existing users; I pay $7 per month for it, and it works fine. But I know it’s not getting any new updates or features, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to shut it down entirely at some point. So it seems prudent to get my data out of it and into a more actively-supported product. A while back, I paid a flat fee to set up a personal Basecamp account, which is now 37signals’ only active product. I haven’t really done anything with it though. While I could shoehorn my Backpack data into it, it’s not really appropriate as a general note-taking and reference tool.

Looking at some other options, I would be tempted to go with OneNote, since it’s now freely available across Windows, Mac, and iOS, but I’m not convinced that Microsoft isn’t going to pull the rug out from under the Mac and/or iOS versions at some point. Their commitment to alternative platforms comes and goes, so I just don’t feel like it would be a great idea for me to commit to a product that might disappear in the next management shake-up.

Evernote, on the other hand, is (of course) the main product for Evernote, the company. They’ve always been cross-platform, and I can’t think of any reason why that would change any time soon. And they seem pretty stable as a company, and not not likely to run out of money, or get acquired and shut down, or any of the other things that tend to happen with small, young, Internet start-ups.

There are two things, functionally, that I don’t like about Evernote. First, I don’t entirely like the simple linear organization of notes. As stated above, yes, you can easily search through the notes to find what you need, but I still like to have a bit more structure. (OneNote is really good on that front.) And it bothers me a bit that they don’t support plain-text notes, only rich-text. That might not seems like a big deal to most people, but it can get in the way when I want to paste some source code into a note. The “paste as plain text” option helps out there, but I’d really like an option to just have a new note be either rich text or plain text, and maybe to set an entire notebook to be plain-text by default. But I think I can live with both of these slight annoyances.

What I’ve decided to do with Evernote, in terms of imposing some organization on it, is to create multiple notebooks (but not too many) to sort things out into a few major buckets, then use tags to make it easier to find certain things, such as all notes related to comic books, or all notes related to F# programming. I’ve renamed my default notebook to “Inbox”, and I’ll be using it as an inbox in the usual GTD sense (though maybe not being as strict as I could be). New stuff will go in there until I sort it out somewhere else or delete it. The other major notebooks I’ve set up are:

  • Lists: various active lists, such as my list of which Dresden Files books I’ve read and which I haven’t.
  • Reference: various notes that I may need for reference in the future, such as the note reminding me that “sudo killall coreaudiod” is the command I need to use on my Mac whenever sound stops working.
  • Archive: old notes that I probably won’t ever need again, but maybe I will, so I might as well keep them.

That’s probably all I need, but I’ve also created a “Travel” notebook, for travel-related notes, and I may create a few other topic-specific notebooks.

Once I get to the point where I feel like I’ve got a good system going in Evernote, I’m going to want to consolidate the notes that I have in other systems into Evernote. I’ve already mentioned Backpack; that’s been my primary GTD and general note-keeping system for some time now. Copying stuff out of there and into Evernote shouldn’t be too big a problem.

I also have a bunch of old notes on my Mac in DevonThink. I actually really like DevonThink, and I kind of wish I could use it as a front-end to Evernote, but it’s really a Mac-only solution. What I have in there, at this point, is mostly software license info (which could go into either Evernote or 1Password), and some miscellaneous lists and Mac-specific reference info.

And, finally, I have a fair amount of stuff in OneNote on my desktop PC. This all dates back to a time when I was using that desktop PC a lot more often than I am now. I don’t recall entering any new info into OneNote this year. So, again, it shouldn’t be too hard to get that stuff into Evernote, mostly into the ‘Reference’ or ‘Archive’ notebooks.

The benefits of doing all this will be:

  1. I’ll have all my notes in a single store, accessible on my Mac, PC, and iOS devices, and via the web. (The stuff that was previously only on the Mac or PC will now be available everywhere.)
  2. I can discontinue my $7/month Backpack subscription. (I don’t currently have a paid Evernote account, and I probably don’t need one. But if I want one, it’s still a bit cheaper than Backpack was.)
  3. I don’t have to worry about relying on a product that’s not really supported anymore, and might get discontinued at any time.

So this has turned into a pretty ridiculously long blog post, but writing it helped me straighten a few things out in my head, and maybe reading it will help someone else out someday. (Or at least amuse someone slightly.)

contact and calendar management

A few years back, I wrote up a couple of blog posts on my search for the “holy grail” of contact and calendar management. Back then, I had a BlackBerry, and I was hoping to find a good way to keep things in sync between the phone, my PC, and my Mac. I went through a few less than perfect options, which aren’t worth going into at this point.

Nowadays, I’ve got an iPhone, and I’ve found that iCloud does a fine job of keeping the iPhone, iPad, and Mac in sync. On the PC, I really don’t bother trying to keep a full set of contacts in Outlook anymore, nor do I keep my calendar there. I can always look anything up on icloud.com or on my iPhone. And, while I use Gmail for most of my mail, I don’t really feel a need to keep my Gmail contacts fully up-to-date either. There’s really only a small set of people who I e-mail regularly, and they’re all in my Google contacts, so there’s no problem there.

So, since everything’s working so well, of course I’m starting to mess around with it. I installed the vipOrbit app on my iPhone this week. It’s a program for managing contacts and calendars. Right now, the iPhone and iPad clients are free, the Mac desktop client is $30, and the sync service that I would need to subscribe to is $45/year. So I thought I’d start out by trying the iPhone app, and see if it was worth going any farther with it. The app imported my contacts from the main iPhone contact app with no problems. But, I found that it did not import all the fields. In particular, it didn’t import birthdays or the free-form notes field from contacts. The app has several user-defined fields available, so maybe there was a way to map those and import the birthdays and notes into them, but it wasn’t obvious how I could do that. I played around with the app a bit, and, while I think it might be useful for a salesperson tracking leads and/or customers, it’s not really useful enough for me to justify both the price and the inconvenience of keeping my contacts and calendar outside of the normal default iPhone apps.

Next, I may choose to try out fruux. Fruux is just a sync & backup service for contacts, calendars, and tasks. So, I’d keep using the default iOS apps, but would keep things in sync with fruux instead of iCloud. I honestly have no good reason to do this, except “just for the hell of it”. Or maybe so I can say I’m not 100% tied in to the Apple ecosystem.