This is the second part of the sequel on my way of using Evernote. The first one was about the creation of notes and the third will be about notebooks and tags and my overall approach to organising the content inside Evernote. In this part, I’ll describe how I use Evernote for task management.

My tool of choice for task management had been Trello. It still is for collaborative work on projects and for strategic flows, but I “migrated” my personal task management entirely to Evernote.

How? I simply use the way reminders appear on top of all notes with the ability to rearrange them by dragging, as Kanban board. Continue reading →

I’ve been using Evernote a lot in the past few years. My membership started in January 2010. I had been using Zim for note-taking before that and I kept using both in parallel for a while. It was the synchronisation capability that made me move entirely to Evernote.

After using Evernote for a few years, I decided to “migrate” more content and workflows to it. One trigger was the trouble of managing information on several platforms and failed attempts to link them. Another was the inspiration from the Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. I had no intention to imitate the latter and no illusion that I could solve the former, and yet there was a considerable improvement in my personal information management. Now I can quickly find what I’m looking for and what it is related with. More importantly, I can be surprised with new relations and discoveries, the important difference between using and working with.

I haven’t read any of the Evernote books, nor I participate in the fora. Yet, it seems that the way I use the tool is worth sharing, at least this was the feedback from people that had a glimpse of my note-taking practice.

I was using Trello for managing tasks, various note-taking apps – mainly Zim and Google Keep, Adobe Cloud for PDFs, shortly also Mendeley for research, and Pocket for reading articles. For website bookmarking and highlights I used Diigo, and Dropbox and Drive –  for storing and syncing documents. My main requirements were two: to quickly retrieve information from all these places and link resources within and across. That included the need to consolidate and link my notes and highlights from Kindle books and PDFs.

Evernote completely replaced Zim, Keep, Adobe Cloud, Mendeley and Diigo and partially – Trello, Dropbox and Google Drive. I miss many of the capabilities of these tools, but I don’t regret leaving them. When consulting enterprises, I always support diversity and demonstrate ways to experience a landscape of heterogeneous applications as a single system. However, a corporate approach to information management is not fully applicable for a personal one.

Most of what I do is probably common for regular Evernote users, or likely to be only related to my specific needs, but I guess there are a few tweaks that some might find useful, either to apply or as insights for a better solution. Continue reading →