A note is a note is … my brain
I have written before on Evernote, the humble application that started as a Windows note-taker with a funky but lovely interface, then become a centralized service with free clients for Mac, Windows, browser, iPhone, Blackberry, and the list keeps growing.
As I reported before, Evernote started becoming ubiquitous on my machines (I happen to use several, on different OS’s, as part of my consulting job). Having an always auto-synchornized, always up-to-date record of ANYTHING I wrote or pictured or scribbled was enough to convert me. Add to that automatic scanning of all pictures and formidable character recognition, one of the best (nimble) interfaces I have seen, availability via browser, lightning-fast search, solid clipping and tagging functionality, (recent) sharing of notebooks with other users, and you can understand why an Evernote notebook is ALWAYS open on ANY computer I am using.
Slowly but surely, EverNote took over space and timethat had before been devoted to other applications:
- Bye bye stickies, notepads, etc., because an Evernote note is for ever (never needed to delete one), and ubiquitous, and available wherever I am because I always have with me one of the devices that can be used to take “notes”, even if it’s by snapping a picture;
- Bye bye outlining and hierarchical notepads; outlines and hierarchies quickly grow out of manageability, and as a result become beautifully engineered but heavy maintenance structures. To make it worse, reality (or my understanding of it) drastically changes with time, and when it does the hierarchy I built does not represent it any more. At that point, I either need to spend a lot of my time to fix the structure, or throw it away. A simple indented list from EverNote is usually a good device, not only because it is intuitive to use, but also because it contains its own “recommended scope”: If the list becomes unwieldy to manage, I am over-complicating things, time to simplify. And, of course, it’s also (to all practical purposes) eternal and ubiquitous, and searchable and…
- Bye bye word processors. This one is a little unfair, because I have been trying to get rid of those ridiculously over-functional pieces of bloatware for a long time. Not that I have a problem using them, on the contrary, I am quite good with them, and have used them to write content pieces much larger and sophisticated than they were designed for. I despise them because they are huge, create false dependencies with form and presentation, are used as lock-in by Microsoft, tend to hog my computer’s resources, and make me write very, very long sentences justifying why I hate them. In any case, Evernote strikes the right balance of formatting by sticking to what you can format in a basic Web editor, which is a good balance for me. I am happy to say that I have not used MS Word for creative purposes for over a year: I only use it when I am locked in by someone else (i.e., needing to collaborate on somebody else’s file). Even if I do oblige (particularly with customers), I make sure the other person understands that I consider her choice of format a major pain. I wish more people did the same…
- Bye bye OmniFlow, iGTD, tiddlywiki and the other GTD applications that I have used through the years: I started using Evernote plus a simple system of specialized tags (@TAG for contexts, +NAME for people, and *PROJECT for projects), made those tags sub-tags of higher-order ones (@CONTEXT, +PEOPLE and *PROJECTS), and used them as instant synthesizers. I ended up with a GTD system that is not only first-class (it supports all key ideas of the GTD system) but also requires MINIMUM BEHAVIOR CHANGES in order to use, much less than using any of the other implementations
- Bye bye creating a separate content collaboration space with each customer (Usually done in Drupal): a shared notebook keeps us always up to speed, and the rest is overhead. This is an area where I believe Evernote could become a killer social application for knowledge workers, and the recent addition of sharing may mean that the very smart people behind it are looking into that. There is so little to add to the current functionality that I really hope they do.
Increasing encroachment is also taking place in my blog writing (this posting, as many others in other blogs, are at least drafted in Evernote, sometimes completely written in it) and other social writing.
Am I saying that Evernote is all of those things in one? Absolutely not. I am saying that, IF you are a minimalist like me, and value computer-independence, tagging, web-level formatting, and usability, Evernote has all that it needs to replace the minimum set of features in all of those applications, and then some more (like taking a picture of a business card and having Evernote turning it into a searchable contact record, or a library of all web clippings that really matter to you, and more).
How can you go wrong? Release registry and disk space, gain complete and constant (and searchable, and semantically taggable, and actionable, and web-publish-able) access to everything you write, avoid bloatware, and release meaningless time devoted to unneeded form to be used instead for creating…
Why am I writing then “a note is a note is … my brain”? Because “note taking” is a narrowly constructed phrase that deceives you about Evernote. “Note taking” is something you do while boring professors, bosses, clients and collaborators talk in the background, something you do as a quick solution until you get to a “real writing device and metaphor”, something you do it in whatever paper you have on hand (or my favorite 3×5 cards) but you know you’ll have to re-process, it’s always a means to a presumably higher goal. That’s deceiving.
When you know that every note you take will be always available, that it will integrate into your life in front of the computer, the phone, the PDA, the laptop with ZERO effort on your part, that you won’t have to remember it because tags and search will bring it to you, a note is not only a note and a task and a project and a document and a blog post and … A note is what happens when you write. Period. Any simplifictions you need to do to leverage them is justified and well worth it!
Because for me writing, speaking and thinking are inextricably linked, my note repository is starting to look like my mind’s mirror (Except the reflection remembers much better than the real one). I always tell people to whom I show Evernote that if the computer had been invented before steel, the first typewriter would have looked exactly like Evernote.
It’s actually ironic that a few applications before captured my imagination as potentially being capable to contain all my activities (Are you old enough to remember MORE on the Mac?). Many of them started as a “PIM”, other as outliners, others as databases, and then started layering layer upon layer of functionality on those “standards”. And now, here comes Evernote and makes me realize that a core of very well thought functionality, Web 2.0 and a truly minimalist approach were the right ingredients.
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 4:37 pm and is filed under enterprise collaboration, nokia N810. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.