Evernote 4+

I used to love Evernote. I don’t use it for business per se, but I need to find info when I need it! Not 5 minutes after I started searching for it in the app. I had EVERYTHING, EVERY THING in Evernote but couldn’t find things because it would NOT show info within notes that I was searching for. Also, I had some notes that I had unknowingly put the title in quotes! That was a big mistake. Even when I KNEW it was in Evernote, I could not access it. Very frustrating. I finally ended up parting ways with Evernote. Now comes the bad news. I had over a thousand notes! There is NO WAY to export your contents!!!! I had to literally copy EACH NOTE and place in Apple Notes. What a huge pain. Then I went on a long and fruitless search for a note program that would do everything evernote was doing. Well, I’m back again. There were several deal breakers for other programs. Even though evernote is not perfect it still seems to be the best option that I could find. I am very careful to specifically title notes with key words. You cannot get Evernote to download everything. I can try to download an article and most times I get only a link. This puts me in the same predicament I was in initally! I cannot access the ‘cloud’ at all times and I work in a hospital!!! Lots of lead shielding and the like. I have to go in paragraph by paragraph and copy/paste into evernote to have access to it when the cloud is absent. I hate the ‘cloud’.

I’ve been using Evernote for at least 7 years, but it has mostly ended up as a side show to to my workflow, despite many attempts to make it a central repository for my work. When I started consulting, I looked at it as an opportunity to use Evernote more fully in my workflow, tracking clients, calls, meetings, etc. I set up tags and notebooks but it never seemed to quite work. Is each client a tag or a notebook? Without a calendar function, how can I track progress against a timeline? Reminders pop up once, but there’s not a snooze function, nor is there a place to see when your reminders are scheduled in a calendar. I tried plug-ins or IFTTT to make Evernote work with Google calendars to no avail. Then, documents for clients have to be in Word or Excel or PDF, so why should I do them in Evernote? And if I did want to share drafts of things in Evernote, the sharing a note experience is awful if the client is not in Evernote too. And I can’t do calculations in Evernote, so my billing and invoicing has to be done elsewhere too. Finally, they released this update and I thought, "OK, well at least the design will improve, and the desktop will look more like the web version (which is clean and much more visually appealing, like the iPhone app)". But...nope. As far as I can tell, all that changed is the icon. So, for me, I think I’ll go back to using it as a repository of things I find on the internet.

Since 2014 Evernote has become indispensable in my decades as a technology consultant, as well as a guy who likes to do lots of different things that can sometimes spin off info of all kinds from the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 10s, and now 2020s have been typed, spoken, scanned or simply dragged into Evernote. Family documents, scrapbooks, manuscripts, some from the 1800s are scanned and filed in Evernote. Thousands more items that range from the mundane to the personally profound are added each year. They're all searchable; typed notes, MS Office files, PDFs, hand written notes, photos, large scale drawings, doodlings, voice note, saved voice mail, links to files and folders in my Dropbox, Google Drive(s), NAS drives, blog pages, you name it, are all accessible to me on any computing device that's accessible to me. An Evernote irony that seems to occur is; the same friends who like to poke fun at my penchant for typing and scanning into Evernote seemingly obscure bits of daily life are the same people who call me months and years later asking for a phone number, a person's name, a car part number, a photo of a boat, an article about an artist, a gadget user guide, and more, that they never imagined they would ever want or need. Maybe it takes imagination and a sense of humor to appreciate Evernote. I do.