40Tech » Productivity

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?

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

Defer Items in Your Outlook Inbox, and Get to Inbox Zero, With Boomerang for Outlook

Evan Kline — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 01:00:04 +0000

I’ve been using Mailbox on my iPhone for over a week now, and one of the features that I like the best is the ability to defer items in my email inbox. With a swipe and a tap, I can temporarily get an item out of my inbox, and set it to reappear at a future date (yes, I can hear the GTDer’s out there screeching in horror that I don’t just move it into my GTD system). I like the feature so much that I longed for the ability to do the same on my desktop at work, where we use Microsoft Outlook. The hunt was on.

It didn’t take me long to find Boomerang for Outlook, an Outlook plugin whose sole purpose is to let you defer messages to a later date. When you want to defer a message, you hit a dropdown menu, and select when you want the message to reappear in your inbox. The message will disappear (it gets moved to a “Boomerang” folder), and make a reappearance at the chosen time.

I’ve had one glitch with Boomerang. I can’t get the Boomerang menu onto the Quick Access Toolbar, so that it is quickly available from within the mail message itself, instead of just in the message list. Boomerang’s support team sent me instructions on how to do it, but those instructions didn’t work for me. I have a follow up email in to Boomerang support, who were quick to respond to my initial inquiry. I’ll see how it goes.

Boomerang for Outlook costs $29.95, and has a one week free trial. If you know of other mail deferral options in Outlook, let me know in the comments. For a non-native method of deferring mail, check out my previous post on Followupthen and FollowUp.cc.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

Mailbox Needs a Monitization Strategy, for My Sake

Evan Kline — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:10:31 +0000

Mailbox needs a monetizaton strategy. For my sake. And yours, if you use the app.

Right now, Mailbox, an iPhone email app that actually does live up to the hype (more on that in a future post), is free. The app is free, and so is the service, even though the app requires server infrastructure, and even though Mailbox has something like 10 bajillion people either using it, or waiting in line for it.

Perhaps the folks at Mailbox have a monetization plan of charging when it debuts on other platforms. Perhaps Orchestra, the developers behind Mailbox, plan to offer additional paid features in the future.

It doesn’t feel that way, though. I haven’t seen one mention of a monetization plan, which leads to a sneaking and scary possibility about how Orchestra plans to make money: Orchestra has developed such an awesome email app, out of hopes that Mailbox gets acquired.

If that’s true, why is that bad? The web is littered with the carcasses of promising startups that were purchased, only to be absorbed and shuttered (or ignored). Sparrow was the last email client destined to be great, but it has languished since its purchase by Google. Twitter purchased Posterous, a blogging site, and now is in the process of shutting it down. Apple purchased Lala, and then proceeded to shut it down.

There are some exceptions. For example, Apple purchased Siri, and temporarily shut it down, only to bring it back as a central part of iOS. Of course, when Apple bought it, announced development on Blackberry and Android came to an end. Some original Siri features were missing, too.

So please, Mailbox, charge us. Lots even. Just stick around.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

Are You in Line For Mailbox? [iPhone]

Evan Kline — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:59:00 +0000

If you follow tech news, it’s been hard to miss mention of Mailbox. Mailbox, as described in some glowing reviews, looks to be a new way to handle email, with a focus on Gmail. The general concept behind Mailbox is to help you get to inbox zero by letting you perform full and half swipes to the left and right to archive, delete, and defer messages. The current problem with Mailbox? There’s a long line to get it.

Although Mailbox is focused on Gmail, your mail does go through the Mailbox servers in order to be able to be processed by the app (you can decide for yourself whether you’re comfortable with the security implications of this). As a result, the developers wanted to make sure that they didn’t overload the servers, and have gone with a staggered rollout, using an invitation system. Open the app before your turn comes, and you’ll see something like this:

Cult of Mac has a story with some calculations to help give you an idea of when you might get in, based on your place in line. If the developers are right, these calculations will be a worst-case scenario, as the developers have indicated that they plan an exponential rollout as time goes by.

Are you in line for Mailbox? Or is this all a lot of hype and little substance? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Or maybe you already have it? If so, let us know what you think.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

Voice Dictation – Finally Ready For Primetime

Evan Kline — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:40:58 +0000

Is voice dictation finally ready to be a viable alternative to typing? When I first used Dragon Dictation several years ago, I was impressed, but thought that it wasn’t quite ready for primetime. Whether because of limitations of the software, my own mistakes, or because of limitations of the hardware, Dragon made just enough errors to really slow me down.

Fast-forward to today. When voice dictation came to the iPad (that little microphone on the iPad keyboard if you have an Internet connection), I didn’t notice at first. One day, though, I gave it a try, and was amazed by the accuracy. When dictation arrived on the Mac, I started dictating much of my text there, too. I’m now using the new version of Dragon on my work PC, and using dictation on my iPhone, which means that dictation is my primary form of text entry on all platforms.

I should note that I’m not dictating anything complex. At work, I still use a secretary for letters. For emails, case notes, and other routine tasks, I’m about 100% dictation. I do need to make sure I’m not too conversational in my dictation, but otherwise my output is indistinquishable from my typed work. It just gets done faster.

Do you do much dictation? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments.

Photo from stylesr1 at stock.xchng

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

Location (Geofence) Reminders Not Working in iOS 6? Disable Exchange Reminder Sync

Evan Kline — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 12:59:16 +0000

After a couple of years as a mostly satisfied Android user, I recently switched back to the iPhone (the reasons might someday be the subject of another story). I was eager to try out location-based reminders, which reminded me of a stripped down (but easier) version of Tasker on Android. I liked the idea that I could use Siri to say, “remind me to take out the trash when I get home,” and I’d have a reminder added to my list in the Reminders app. Thanks to geofencing in iOS, that reminder would automatically fire when I pulled into the driveway.

There was one problem – my location-based reminders weren’t actually firing. A Google search for the problem revealed one common solution in the Apple forums. Several users suggested that if you were syncing with an Exchange server, make sure that you were not syncing Tasks. Since Exchange/Outlook didn’t support location-based tasks, Reminders on iOS would be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. That seemed to fit my situation, as I use Outlook at work.

I hopped over into Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendars, selected the settings for my work Exchange account…and didn’t find any setting to disable Task sync. After a moment of head scratching, I remembered that Tasks were called “Reminders” in iOS 6, and I did see a setting for that.

Disabling Reminder sync for my Exchange account, and making sure it was enabled for my iCloud account, did the trick. I’m now happily getting location-based reminders on my iPhone. That might not be an ideal situation for those of you who use Outlook tasks, but it worked for me. If you know of another solution, let me know in the comments.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

Quick Trash Shortcuts [Mac]

Evan Kline — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 13:43:01 +0000

Timesavers that I love, but don’t use enough, are an operating system’s keyboard shortcuts. OS X Daily recently covered four pretty basic ones involving the trash, of which I was unaware. Here is an example of one of the four:

Command+Delete with anything currently in the Trash selected returns it to the original location in the file system. You can also access this by right-clicking an item and choosing “Put Back”

For the rest, head on over to the original article.

4 Useful Trash Keyboard Shortcuts Every Mac User Should Know

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

Overwhelmed With Your TextExpander Snippets? Set a Quick Search Shortcut

Evan Kline — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 20:55:05 +0000

Right now, I’m up to 128 snippets in TextExpander. There are several that I have committed to memory, but even more that I hardly ever use. This is because I can’t remember the shortcuts to launch them, so it is just as quick for me to type normally as it is for me to open TextExpander and find a particular shortcut. I recently learned of a quicker solution, however.

If you subscribe to the TextExpander newsletter, you’ve already seen this one. It involves setting a hotkey in order to trigger a search feature. You do this by opening TextExpander and going to the Preferences pane. Once there, look for “Suggest Matching Abbreviation.” Click the button, and set your hotkey.

Once you’ve set your hotkey, start typing a few characters of either your snippet or abbreviation, and then hit your hotkey. A popup menu appears listing all of the snippets that contain the characters you typed. You can either scroll through them and click one, or hit Command + the number of the snippet.

One word of caution – I couldn’t get this to work at first. I suspect that the shortcut I had selected was already in use by another app or the operating system. I switched to another shortcut (Command + Control + Option + [minus symbol), and then things worked fine.

If you have any other TextExpander tips, let me know in the comments.

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

Still Looking for a Truly Slick Task Manager? Any.DO Could Be It. [Android, iOS, Chrome]

Bobby Travis — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 03:29:04 +0000

I’ve found myself plenty busy lately. The new job, new baby, and newly four have been making it difficult to get sleep, let alone writing time. As a result, however, my obsession for to-do apps has flexed its brawn and muscled its way back to the forefront of my thoughts — especially after I accidentally discovered Any.DO.

Which is awesome!

Any.DO has been out on the Android platform for a while now, but came to my attention when it expanded its product line to include the iPhone. There’s a web app now, too, but it’s in closed beta at the moment. The Chrome extension works just fine though, and between it and my iOS devices, I’ve found myself some well-designed, beautiful, and oh-so-functional love.

Any.DO shines just about every which way. It’s got a clean, slick and very usable design (in white or black themes), it syncs tasks across devices via the cloud, it has the base functions every task manager needs (reminders, notes, folders/labels, filters), and it does such a good job of getting out of its own way that it is a joy to use.

That last bit there — the joy — is key. So many to-do apps end up never being used simply because they take too much effort to keep a good flow going. Any.DO makes it easy to get started by including Facebook registration and logon, and even has a cool video tutorial when you first open it up. Once you’re in, things like swiping tasks to complete or un-complete, drag and drop to organize, predictive text, and the ability to add tasks with your voice make you want to stick with it.

There are some other nice features as well, such as task sharing via email, Facebook, and Twitter, some contact list integration, and the ability to clear all completed tasks just by shaking your phone. There is also a calendar view when you turn your phone to landscape mode, and — for Android users, anyway — the ability to sync with Google Tasks. Google Tasks sync might come along for other versions, as well, and there has been some mention of adding sync for other services, as well, such as Remember the Milk, Springpad, Producteev, Outlook, etc., but no definitive word on when that might happen, if at all.

What Any.DO is missing, at the moment, are connections to Evernote and Google Calendar. Those two things could turn this little app into a powerhouse in its own right — though I have to say, it works pretty damned well all by its lonesome! And it doesn’t hurt that you get all of the awesome that you do get for the oh-so-sweet-and-convenient price of nada.

Give it a go. Try Any.DO on your Android device, in your Chrome browser, or on your iPhone (pay no attention to the reviews on the app store — I haven’t had any issue getting the app to work at all). If you like it, let us know — and don’t forget to sign up for the web app beta.

Any.DO

Here are some related posts that might interest you:

4 Insanely Simple Steps to Email Inbox Sanity

Evan Kline — Wed, 23 May 2012 01:00:00 +0000

The other night, I glanced over as my wife was using her laptop in bed. I couldn’t help but notice a number that jumped out at me: 7000+ unread items in her email inbox. I think my wife uses her inbox as a holding pen for her messages. She also isn’t too strict about using a second email account as a bacon address for her less important messages. While never as, um, interesting as my wife’s email practices, my inbox was out of control last year. Four changes helped me bring sanity to my email inboxes.

1. Declare Bankruptcy to Start With a Clean State

The first step I took, when my Gmail inbox was a disaster, was to declare email bankruptcy. I had a large number of messages that I intended to get to some day. I eventually was honest with myself, and figured that if I hadn’t read a message after a period of time, I probably wasn’t ever going to read it. So, I reviewed all messages that were less than a few weeks old, and archived the remainder.

I can happily report that I have been able to keep my inbox under control ever since declaring bankruptcy. I wish I had noted the date that I took that step, but I think it has to be close to a year since I did it.

2. Don’t Obsess Over Tagging and Folders

After declaring bankruptcy, the next step for me was to become less obsessive about tagging every message, and to seriously slim down the number of tags that I use. I went through my tags, and merged several of them into brooder categories.

I also reduced the number of tags that I apply to individual messages. I do have several Gmail filters set up that pre-label a majority of incoming messages. Beyond that, though, I typically will only apply one tag to a message. Part of this is because I use Apple Mail to access my Gmail account. Within Mail I use Mail Act-On, an Apple Mail plugin. With a quick key command, I can move a message to one of several Mail folders, and get it out of my inbox. This assigns the message to the identical Gmail label. Being limited to one label/folder helps speed things up, since I’m not worrying about every possible label.

Also, I often don’t even bother with labels. I just tap the archive key, figuring that I can rely on Gmail’s search capabilities to find messages later.

3. Don’t Sweat It, and You Won’t Hate It

The third change was a change in mindset: do it but don’t sweat it. I carve out periods of time to get through my messages. If I don’t get to my mail, though, I don’t sweat it. This helps me not dread going through my email. The mere fact of not dreading email helps me get through my mail almost every day.

4. Don’t Use a Unified Inbox

The third change is one that is contrary to a technique we’ve discussed here previously, and is a change that will cause many of geeks out there to gasp in dismay – I no longer use a unified inbox for all of my accounts. The reason for this is simple. I had one account that was dragging down all of the others. It was busier than the other accounts, yet less important. If I don’t get to that one, it’s no big deal. With my accounts segregated, I can now get my main inboxes to zero on a regular basis, and get to that “busy” inbox when I have more time. That also helps with my “don’t sweat it and you won’t hate it” mindset.

There are four steps that anyone can take, without much effort, to help get a crazy email inbox under control. If you have any tips for managing your email, let us know in the comments.