40Tech » Organization

Evernote Tags vs. Notebooks: Which Are Better for Organization? [Reader Feedback]

Evan Kline — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:27:40 +0000

A recent article on Lifehacker has me wondering if I’m using Evernote all wrong. I only have two main notebooks in Evernote: Work, and Personal. There are a few other random ones that are automatically created by apps, such as the notebook that Scanner Pro, an iOS app, creates. I also have an “Inbox” notebook where notes reside until they are moved into one of the other notebooks. But by and large, all of my notes go into my two main notebooks. Am I in the minority with how I use Evernote notebooks?

In a recent post on Lifehacker, Whitson Gordon noted as follows:

I found that most of my ‘notes’ should have, in fact, been ‘notebooks,’ allowing me to store larger volumes of information with better organization.”

Well then. That’s not how I use Evernote. I use tags as my main organizational feature.

Why I Tag

I find tags to be superior than having many notebooks for two reasons:

1. A note can have multiple tags. I find that too many of my notes are pertinent to multiple subject areas, and would be hard to categorize into one Notebook.

2. Speed and efficiency. I don’t have to give thought to both my selection of tags, and selection of a notebok. The latter is obvious, so all I really need to think about is picking tags.

In fact, I often slack off with tagging notes, given Evernote’s search functionality. When I create a note, it by default goes into my Inbox notebook, with the hope that I will immediately tag it, and file it into a Notebook. I say “with the hope” because I currently have 358 notes in my Inbox. My Inbox has been in a similar state for a couple of years, and I have yet to run into a problem with it.

(To see how you can use just one notebook with a GTD system, check out Bobby Travis’ post on Getting Things Done (GTD) in Evernote with Only One Notebook ).

The Lifehacker article has caused me to think about how I use Evernote, however. There are some areas where I wouldn’t have a problem shoehorning notes into just one notebook, and where extra notebooks might be useful. For example, a notebook for all my photography-related notes could help with organization, as could a dedicated notebook whenever I plan a vacation. In the end, I see notebooks more as an aesthetic tool than anything.

How about you? Are you a notebook person, or a tag person? How many notebooks do you use? How about tags?

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Geek Out Your Desktop With Rainmeter [Windows]

Evan Kline — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, I asked you to let us know how many items you had on your desktop. Answers ranged from 0 to 79 desktop items. In a late reply to that same post, one of the commenters mentioned Rainmeter, a desktop customization tool for Windows. I actually started using Rainmeter a few months ago on the one Windows machine available to me, and it is pretty cool if you really want to geek out your desktop.

Rainmeter is a tool that lets you customize your desktop by adding skins and other widgets. If you want to keep your desktop clean, you might think that Rainmeter isn’t for you. Take a look at the screenshot at the top of this post, though.

That’s my Windows 7 desktop (minus the taskbar), using Rainmeter. The idea for that desktop came from a Lifehacker post, although I only used the suggested Rainmaker hacks and the Early Sunrise Wallpaper from HD Wallpapers. To keep things lightweight, I didn’t modify the taskbar or icons.

My setup shows just one use of Rainmeter. I’m using it to display the time and weather on my desktop. You can also use it to show things like RSS feeds, your email, or system stats (such as available memory). If you use a Rainmeter skin that supports it, you can launch apps, control your music, or record your notes.

Rainmeter is too feature-rich and involved to cover in a blog post, but the Rainmaker site offers some great support. Rainmaker 101 is a good place to get started. If you get comfortable with it, you could dive into a full-blow skin suite. These suites come prepackaged with skins and other applets.

Are you using Rainmeter or some other desktop customization tool? If so, start tidying up and getting your screenshots ready. I’m looking for the best place for readers to show off their desktops, so stay tuned. If you want other thoughts on how to simply your desktop, check out Bobby Travis’ post on Minimal Wall. If you like having icons on your desktop, click on over to my look at Fences. Coming soon we’ll discuss GeekTool, which lets you trick out your Mac desktop.

Do you use any tools to organize or geek out your desktop?

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Take Your Digital Filing System With You, and Keep it Secure, With SecretSync

Evan Kline — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Last year I wrote about SecretSync, an app that lets you securely sync files via Dropbox. SecretSync encrypts any file that you drop into your SecretSync folder, and then sends it on to your other computers via Dropbox. If those computers are running SecretSync (and you’ve set up the proper security key), the file will then be decrypted on those machines as well. I covered all that in my previous article, though, so why mention it again? After taking SecretSync for a spin last year, I stopped using it. I’ve just found a great new use, though, that makes SecretSync an integral part of my paperless document management system.

You may recall that my document management system lets me put a document into my scanner, push the scan button, and then sit back and let my Mac do the rest of the work. The document will be automatically renamed and filed into the proper folder on my machine, with no effort on my part. This can be done with Evernote, too.

That system is great, but only works if you’re sitting at your computer. Wouldn’t it be nice to make that system portable? That’s where SecretSync comes in. I wanted to be able to scan documents while away from home, and have them sync via Dropbox back to my home computer, where they’d be automatically processed. I didn’t like the idea of sending sensitive documents through Dropbox, though, which doesn’t have a stellar track record with security.

I now have SecretSync set up on all of my computers, including my iMac at home. I can now scan a document on any of those computers, and it gets sent into my SecretSync folder on each machine. On my iMac, Hazel moves any files in the SecretSync folder over to my “Action” folder, where they are automatically renamed and filed.

That’s all there is to it. This, of course, presupposes that you have a scanner when you’re away from home. My most common use for this system is when I’m paying bills over lunch at the office, where I do have a scanner. My next step will probably be to research iOS and Android scanning apps, to see if any of them offer optical character recognition. OCR is essential to this workflow, and truly would make this a “go anywhere” system.

When I last wrote about SecretSync, it was a Windows-only app. Since then, it has come to OS X and Linux.

Can you use your filing system while away from home? If so, share your setup in the comments.

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How to Automate Your Evernote Scanning and Filing System [Mac]

Evan Kline — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Last week I wrote about the World’s Most Awesome Paperless Filing System, which lets you drop a document into your scanner and have it automatically renamed and then filed away into the proper folder on your Mac. That system used Hazel, a Mac app, to rename and file documents that appeared in a folder, based on the contents of those documents. As I mentioned in that post, I had chosen that system over previous systems, one of which involved Evernote. If you want to use the automation of Hazel to speed up your paperless system, but still use Evernote, then you’re in luck.

My initial post was based on a paperless system by David Sparks of the Mac Power Users podcast. His partner for that show, Katie Floyd, is an Evernote user. On her personal blog, she has detailed how she uses Evernote as her document repository. She also uses Hazel to automate the tagging and filing of documents. She mentions on her blog about a piece of AppleScript gleaned from the Evernote forums that helps Hazel automate the process. The AppleScript looks like this:

tell application “Evernote”
activate
create note from file theFile notebook {“Notebook Name”} tags {“tag1″, “tag 2″, “tag 3″, “tag 4″}
end tell

For more details on her complete system, check out her post and follow her links on KatieFloyd.me. While you’re at it, you may want to give the Mac Power Users podcast a try, too. It has floated its way to the top of my listening rotation.

Do you have any tips or tricks for working Evernote into a paperless filing system?

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The World’s Easiest, Most Awesome, Hands Off, Set and Forget, Document Management System (Mac)

Evan Kline — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 01:00:00 +0000

If you have a paperless filing system, wouldn’t it be nice if you could drop a bill into your scanner, and have it automatically scanned, renamed, and filed in the proper place on your computer, with no effort on your part? And wouldn’t it be nice if you could have access to that document from any computer, with minimal security worries? With a combination of two programs on the Mac, you can do all of that.

My journey into the world of a paperless filing system has had a few twists and turns. For a few years, I used Evernote. I would scan all of my bills and other documents into Evernote, then name and tag them. Evernote gave me the benefit of having my documents available from everywhere. I never felt too comfortable with that system, though, since my data wasn’t encrypted on the Evernote servers. It also required enough effort that I often had a big stack of documents sitting on my desk that needed to be scanned.

Next up was DEVONthink, a Mac-only document management program. DEVONthink is immensely powerful, and got me part way to the automated filing of documents, but I still had to name all of my documents after scanning. DEVONthink also doesn’t make remote access too easy.

The System

Then I heard about a system discussed on one of my favorite podcasts, the Mac Power Users podcast. I was intrigued. One of the hosts, David Sparks, talked about how he used Hazel to automate his filing system. Hazel is an app that monitors folders, and can perform a variety of actions on files that show up in those monitored folders. I already owned Hazel, so I thought I’d give it a try. His system involved having all documents get scanned as PDF files into a Hazel-monitored folder. Hazel would analyze those files, rename them, and move them to an appropriate folder.

I gave it a try with a big pile of documents that were overdue for scanning, and in about an hour I had a dozen Hazel rules set up to automate my paperless system. Goodbye Evernote and DEVONthink, at least as filing tools. I sat back and watched in amazement as the only step required of me was to put a document into my scanner and hit the Scan button. Everything else was automated. One big caveat – this system assumes that your scanner comes with software that provides OCR (optical character recognition), or that you otherwise have access to OCR software. Without it, Hazel can’t analyze the contents of scanned documents.

Here is a screenshot of a sample rule I’m using in Hazel.

This rule looks for documents in my watched folder that contain my electric bill account number, and the word “Electric Utilities” (which shows up on all of my electric bills). Any document that meets those parameters is renamed (more on that below), moved to a subfolder of my “Electric bill” folder, and marked with the color red. The subfolder is based on the year of the bill, so within the “Electric bill” folder is a “2012″ folder.

The Rename function can be examined more closely. Here is that line, expanded:

I’ve modified the “date added” element so that it only appends the year and month, since I just get one bill a month from the electric company. This is a tweak I picked up from David Sparks’ Paperless iBook. At the bottom of the screenshot above, you can see a sample title. Since I scan to PDF, the “.xxx” would be “.pdf” after the renaming.

Since I use one of CrashPlan’s paid plan as part of my backup system, my documents are all available online, too. My understanding of CrashPlan is that your data is encrypted locally before being sent to the CrashPlan servers, so I feel better about having my data in the cloud than I did with Evernote.

Benefits

I see three benefits to my new system. First, it is frictionless. This is the most important factor to me. I don’t have time to sit down and name, tag, and manually file documents. Second, it is nonproprietary. If Evernote or DEVONthink had ever gone away, it would have been a real hassle to me to move my data. And with the search power available on computers now, I’m not losing much by not using a dedicated document management app. Third, I have secure access to my documents. A concern over security is why I moved away from Evernote for document management purposes.

Limitations

There are some limitations to the system. First, the “hands off” aspect of it doesn’t work for all documents. It works for documents, such as bills, that you get on a regular basis. But those random one-off documents that we all receive have to be handled manually. Another limitation has to do with the naming of documents. The system will name the document with the date or month when you scanned the document. So, if you fall behind in your scanning, your documents won’t have the right date unless you manually change the date.

Room For Growth

There are a few tweaks I’m looking into as well. As noted above, I’ve purchased David Sparks’ Paperless book on the iBook Store, and highly recommend it even from the little I’ve read so far. I’m not too far into it, but I jumped ahead to see that he does go through his system in more detail than I’ve covered here, complete with video. I’m anxious to keep reading, and see what other ninja tricks he uses. He does mention something about tagging, which I need to read more closely, as my current system is purely folder based.

I also would like to try to set up Hazel so that I can drop a document into Dropbox from any computer, and have Hazel grab that document and move it into my main folder for processing. That would allow me to manage my bills away from home.

I never thought I’d be excited over a filing system, but I really am psyched about the possibilities of this system. Do you have a favorite system that you use? If so, let us know in the comments.

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Planning For the Disposition of Your Digital Assets for When You Die

Evan Kline — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000

You and I have at least one thing in common. We’re both going to die at some point in the future. Before that happens, remember that digital data can be more important than real world goods. You take steps to arrange for the disposition of your physical possessions in the event of death. How about your email account and other online accounts? If you’re a Gmail user, the Backupify blog recently took a look at what happens to your Gmail account when you die. That article got me thinking beyond just email, to how to best make sure that your digital assets pass to your next of kin when you die.

The Problem

Why might your next of kin need access to your data? Online accounts now often hold crucial information, or control the ability to access information. For example, email accounts now serve as the key to accessing many other accounts. If you need a password reset, that’s where the reset message gets sent. Although not ideal from a security standpoint, some people also use their Gmail accounts to store sensitive financial information, such as information on retirement accounts.

The obvious solution is to make sure that your significant other has your account credentials. This might not be ideal in all situations, though. According to the Backupify story, for example, impersonating another user is a violation of Google’s terms of service, and could result in the suspension or termination of an account. This seems unlikely to happen, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t plan for the possibility.

According to Backupify, your spouse can apply for access to your account after you’ve died. Those steps sound pretty onerous, though, and also require legal papers. Further, according to the story, your spouse will only have access to the contents of the account. He or she won’t actually be able to use it.

Backupify suggests that you treat your virtual assets the same as my non-virtual ones, which includes accounting for those assets in your will. The story points out that online providers may not have accounted for this, but that it will increasingly become an issue.

With all this in mind, what are some other precautions that you could take?

Thoughts on Possible Solutions

Here’s my take, from a non-lawyer (well, I am a lawyer, but not an estate lawyer), on how to make sure your digital life passes smoothly when you die. Since I’m not estate lawyer, here’s the standard disclaimer: you should consult with your own lawyer before making any decisions that involve legal ramifications.

1. In your will, account for your email accounts, password accounts (such as LastPass), and other important accounts, such as your Evernote account, by naming a digital beneficiary;

2. Make sure your spouse knows how to access your accounts. I keep my LastPass password locked up in our safe, and have explained to my wife that she’ll need that and my Yubikey on my keychain in order to get into my LastPass account, should I meet with an untimely end. She’ll also need Authenticator on my phone to get into my Google accounts. However you convey this information to your spouse, make sure that it is secure. You don’t want to create a security hole in the process of planning for your death;

3. Consider online services, such as Entrustet, that take care of the disposition of digital assets upon death (and then hope that those services are still around when you die);

4. Have local backups of your important information, so that your spouse won’t have to deal with a third party to get access to the important stuff.

Those are just a few thoughts of my own. If you have other suggestions for how to deal with your digital assets when you die, let us know in the comments.

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How Many Items Do You Have on Your Computer Desktop? [Reader Feedback]

Evan Kline — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:00:00 +0000

I’ll admit it. Until recently, I was a desktop slob. Despite my best intentions, the desktops on my computers were all jammed full, mostly with junk. If a program placed an icon there during installation, I never bothered to remove it. I typically would use my desktop as the destination for downloads, too. This resulted in an even bigger mess.

Recently, though, I’ve changed. I’m not sure what triggered it, but I’ve been on a tidy desktop kick lately. The desktops on both my work and personal computers are now pristine. Are my a freak now, or was I an oddball when my desktop was a mess? This trivial issue has me curious. How messy is your desktop?

On my iMac’s desktop, I now have three items. I have a “Clean up” folder, the channel changer widget for my eyeTV, and the slide-in drawer for DevonThink. The “Clean up” folder is a folder that older items on the desktop automatically get dumped into, via Hazel. Lately, though, I don’t even wait for the Hazel cleanup rule to kick in. If I see an item on my desktop, I deal with it.

Yes, I went from about 50 items on my desktop, to three. How many items are on your desktop? Do you think keeping a neat desktop really even matters?

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My Conversion from iCal to Google Calendar

Guest Poster — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 02:51:51 +0000

40Tech is pleased to present a guest post by Michael Carper.

When I began college, I was determined to keep track of all my homework, papers, tests, and scheduled activities. A staple of college scheduling is the syllabus, which lays out the due dates and assigned readings and homework for each class. However, syllabuses are just pieces of paper. I realized that it would be a huge pain to look up daily, from four or five different sources, what the assignments were for that day. I wanted to look at a single source and grasp all the work I had to do for that day, and for that week. More importantly, I wanted to keep in mind upcoming tests and papers several weeks ahead of time, in order to prepare time to work on them.

With this predilection for planning, I looked to my built-in OS calendar, iCal. There were many advantages to using it. I didn’t have to boot up Chrome or worry about web browsing. I could organize by color, assigning one to events, one to assignments, and another to work. I actually put my entire class schedule, as well as ordinary things like “lunch,” into iCal. I put not only due dates, but little reminders when certain benchmarks should be met in prep for those due dates. It was my lifeline.

However, little problems grew to be big annoyances. The most striking was the way iCal handled longer titles. I copied entire reading assignments into iCal. For some single class periods, this could include multiple texts or several page selections. Shorter entries would be completely displayed in the month-long calendar view, which I always used. I didn’t need to see my days broken down in the traditional week-long format, but I did want to see the tests and papers on the horizons. However, in this view, longer entries were simply abridged. There was no indication that an entry was actually much longer than it appeared, since they always stuck to a single line. On several instances, this lack of informative UI actually led to ignored homework assignments, since the entry was actually much longer than appeared and contained more readings than it appeared to. Ironically, in those instances, my calendar made me less prepared.

Fall of my freshman year

There were other little things, as well. Entry of events was very manual; you had to put all details in only their specific field. Once made, you could not edit an event after clicking on it, but instead had to go to its “edit” page. The tethering of iCal to my Mac turned out to be a disadvantage, since I often ended up with hours to spare, homework to do, and no personal computer at my fingertips. I couldn’t sync it in any way with my iPod Touch, either.

So beginning of my junior, I finally took a look at Google Calendar. Since I had been a loyal Gmail user for many years, it only seemed natural. Immediately I noticed where GCal improved over iCal. The most prominent was the ease of creating events. I no longer had to cycle through different boxes to mark the date and time. Instead, I could simply jot down, “meeting 12-1” as an entry name for a certain day, and there it appeared, from the 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM slot. And if I felt like changing it, I could edit the entry title from the pop-up that appeared when I clicked it the first time, unlike iCal.

It wasn’t just the cleaner, more pleasing UI that won me over. Accessing my calendar outside my room was as simple as accessing my email–just log in to Google. I could access it on my iPod as well, albeit not with an official Google app. School events were always announced via email. I could either copy and paste the location and time details from one tab to another, or I could even click “More” in Gmail and create an event based on the email. If viewing an online calendar, such as the one published by my college, I could even import all the events into mine.

December of my junior year

Six months later, I still haven’t taken advantage of everything Google Calendar has to offer, like sharing my calendar with others or inviting them to scheduled meetings. Those two functionalities are so amazingly useful, it’s a pity I’ve only encountered them at places I’ve interned. The rest of my fellow students, unfortunately, are still stuck in the Stone Age, with their paper syllabuses and calendar. Some of them may have progressed to iCal, marking their progress into the Bronze Age. They, and everyone else, should wise up and join those of us with our Google Calendars in the Golden Age.

I will add that I’ve tried the Fantastical Calendar app. Fantastical syncs with iCal or Outlook, but not Google Calendar, so I had to export from Google Calendar to iCal and then sync Fantastical with iCal. It’s UI is very nice. The recognition of event details is more intuitive than Google Calendar’s, expanding its recognition to location details and invitees whose address you have in your Contacts as well. You can read more about it in Evan’s review. My judgment is that although it has the best user interface, the ability of Google Calendar to sync with other Google apps, especially through email, is invaluable. Since I always have a web browser opened anyway, leaving a tab for Google Calendar is hardly cumbersome. $20 is a lot for calendar software, but, in my opinion, is something that would be used everyday. So if I spent less time on Google, Fantastical would be my go-to calendar.

Michael is a student at Wabash College and writer for the Reading Glasses Shopper blog. He realizes that actually the Iron Age, not the Golden Age, followed the Bronze Age.

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What’s The Deal With Pinterest? Even My Wife Likes (Obsesses Over) It!

Bobby Travis — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 17:02:58 +0000

So, Pinterest… It’s received a lot of coverage in the past year — it’s even received in the realm of 37 million in funding — but I had trouble seeing the appeal. I wasn’t sure the world needed another social bookmarking site. I wasn’t sure the world needed another way to share, well… anything. I admit, most of this feeling had nothing to do with Pinterest, per se, it was really more about social media overwhelm. I’ve seen a ton of social sharing services go up and down over the past few years, and, as much as I love Google+, I think it maxed me out. Besides, you can do things similar to Pinterest using tools like Evernote and Springpad, right? Right?

Then my lovely wife — a person who has no real interest in tech, barely any interest in social networking, and who only got a smartphone because it was free and I “was bugging her about it” — was somehow inspired to try it out. No prompting from me, or anyone else — she came to it entirely on her own. Now… she’s obsessed. Seriously. For example, I see her awake at 3AM and think that she’s feeding the baby, or something — but no. What’s she’s doing is maniacally pinning and re-pinning things to her boards, and often giggling like mad as she does it. There is apparently a lot of funny on Pinterest…

Title Image clipped from Pinterest Comic

Recently, she’s taken to sharing some of that funny with me, and I’ve discovered that a good portion of it is Star Wars based. This confused the hell out of me (though I still shared some of it with you here and here). My wife has no interest in Star Wars. She’s one of the few people who has never even seen the films, and (horrifyingly) will actually say things like “What’s a hansolo?” I still love her, though. She’s that awesome. She’s beginning to make me see value in Pinterest, too. Anything that could inspire my wife to share seriously awesome Star Wars stuffs with me has got to be pretty powerful.

I checked it out a little more thoroughly. I wanted to know what the deal was. Was there a secret sauce? How did it hook her? What I discovered was four things:

Pinterest is incredibly simple.

Pinterest is to sharing fun and useful images what Evernote is to easy, accessible note-taking. It focuses on that one thing, and makes sure that it is the absolute best at it. It doesn’t overwhelm the user.

Pinterest is visual — and good at it.

Everyone loves a good picture and everyone loves a good photo gallery. Funny and beautiful pics have been making the rounds since the internet was able to support them. People like to look at the images they like again and again. And share them, re-share them, and re-share them again, as well. Pinterest makes this easy, but it also makes it beautiful. The designers have done a fantastic job of taking something that could be overwhelming, both in general and visually, and making it joy to experience.

Like crafty things? This is your home.

There are a ton of cool things to discover on Pinterest, but it really seems to have taken off with the crafty and DIY crowd. This is what ultimately hooked my wife. She loves to see things that people have made, especially if it involves baking or making something cool out of something else. She knows I like that sort of thing as well, and has not only shared some cool Star Wars crafts with me, but also a lot of DIY upcycling and repurposing projects. It’s how I came across Homestyler, actually, which was the topic of my previous post. There is some very cool stuff on Pinterest, and more is pinned every day.

Some of My Wife’s Pins

It connects to the real world. It useful.

Pinterest is more than just a place to store and share images. The images link back to the site you found them on — and if we follow the crafty and DIY point from above, you end up with well-organized, very visual bookmarks back to sites that contain information that you might actually use in your real-world life. This makes Pinterest more than just a random bookmarking service, and more than just an image-sharing service. It makes it a tool that is useful to you both on and offline. It helps you to find, share, save and use things that are of interest to you.

We’ve all heard that “ makes it easy to collect and organize what interests you on the web.” Pinterest actually does it. My wife is living proof. Anything tech-based that can make her go gaga is definitely worth taking a look at. It’s still in beta, but getting an account happens pretty quickly. I recommend giving Pinterest a try. You’ll probably love it.

What do you think of Pinterest? How do you use it?

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Do You Organize Your Emails With Labels, Folders, or Search? [Reader Feedback]

Evan Kline — Mon, 30 May 2011 01:00:53 +0000

We’ve written a good bit about email overload, and given a few tips on how to deal with it. These tips include using Gmail to manage all of your accounts (and even how to avoid Gmail’s infamous delay in checking external accounts), and how to turn the managing of your inbox into a game. When it gets down to the nuts and bolts, how do you manage your account?

There are a few schools of thought out there:

Use labels, such as those offered by Gmail, to tag every message with one or more labels;
Use folders, as offered by traditional email clients and providers, to place each message into a single, distinct folder;
Archive all of your messages into one place, and just use the search functionality of your email client to find your messages; or
A combination of the above methods.

I’ve used labels ever since switching to Gmail years ago, and have several filters set up to automatically label a large percentage of incoming messages. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if it is really necessary. Gmail’s search capabilities are very powerful, and taking the time to label every message can be time consuming. At the very least, I think I can slim my labels down to a few broad categories.

What method do you use to organize your email? Is it one of the methods listed above, or do you have your own way of doing things?