Why I Stopped Using Evernote
This Week Evernote announced it’s 100 millionth user, my account has been dormant for a year — Here’s Why.
I used to love Evernote, really I did. I was that person using their phone and computer and tablet to dump everything from shopping lists to blog post ideas into one central account. I had IFTTT recipes set up and even bought an Evernote Moleskine. Up until about a year ago my entire life went into the app, syncing my content cross my many screens. At the moment more than 5000 notes are sitting in my Evernote account, indexed and searchable instantly. But I don’t use the app anymore. Why? It comes down to bloat and purpose.
Feature Creep
In a march (I guess) to stay exciting among the technorati class Evernote keeps adding features. It started simply enough, adding rich text editing to the smartphone apps, adding the ability to attach any file to a note. Notebook stacks came along to organize your dozens of notebooks into subcategories. Connecting to ever more services and features. Evernote has dozens and dozens of ways to get information into it, from Post-It Notes to iPad apps. But with every one of these new features every version of the app got slower. The app started to only work well if you had the latest piece of hardware. I always knew when my iphone app would slow down, right around the time a new iPhone launched. Evernote is impossible to run on my now 5 year old Macbook Pro, and my work PC wheezes at the thought of importing so much data.
Evernote could conceivably be the repository for ALL of your data. But in trying to supplant all of the things you do digitally in one place, Evernote becomes a bloated, slower version of the things it’s meant to replace. Evernote encourages you to keep all your project files in a notebook. Well why not just save them to a synced hard drive? Evernote encourages you to draft your documents in the app — why not just use MS Word, Google Docs, or Pages (all superior text editors). Evernote wants to be the home of your photos — why not sync them with Dropbox or OneDrive or Flickr — all superior photo organizers/editors? Evernote added reminders to it’s system, but reminding me of a note is strange, and having to create a new note just to remind myself to take out the garbage is very silly in a world where I can simply write a post-it on the front door or talk to Siri. Evernote wants to be your email archive, I think gmail has that covered.
Evernote wants to sell you bags and socks and all manner of expensive mediocre apparel. It seems the idea is to simply take on more functions without making any of them amazing or can’t-live-without. Below is a description of a $242 laptop bag. (Note: a premium subscription is $5 a month)
For years we’ve been seeking that Holy Grail of bags: something that works as hard as a technical backpack while looking more sophisticated than a messenger bag. Côte&Ciel gets it. A boutique fashion accessories brand out of Paris, they bring a designer’s attention to every detail, delivering the ultimate style accessory for modern work and life.
Evernote’s core function — notation — has seen interesting new features and integration, Moleskine notebooks and their acquisiton of Penultimate strike me as more in line with what they are supposed to be — a way to help me remember stuff. But these are offset by forays into Evernote Hello (being replaced by a Linkedin Partnership) and Evernote Food, the point of which still is unclear to me.
Remember Everything?
But even more than the feature creep, there’s something deeper going on here. Evernote prides itself on being an extension of your brain, being able to help you remember everything. Well let’s question for a second if I really need to remember EVERYTHING?
A grocery shopping list from 2011.
A form email from 2009.
A photo of a picket fence that comes up in OCR searches for reasons I do not understand.
The more I have saved in Evernote, the more I realize that most of life is OK to be forgotten. Facebook statuses from God-Knows-When don’t need to saved forever, meeting notes don’t need to be held onto till time in-memoriam. The vast majority of our existence is indeed efemeral and that is OK. Just because we can remember everything doesn’t mean we necessarily should remember everything. Even though the digital weight of data is far less than the phyiscal equivalent, there is still pyschic weight there. I know Evernote lovers are screaming at me “use power searches! organize with stacks! Delete regularly!”
All of that is probably true and I could potentially optimize my database of life in Evernote, that is until my PC gets too old and the app runs like molasses or when I forget the exact wording of a document I’m looking for. In the sea of data, even search isn’t always a life raft.
Phil Libin has said on many occasions that the goal at Evernote is to build a 100-year company, maybe he will succeed and maybe Evernote will re-imagine itself again into something closer to an operating system than a stand alone app. But until then, I’ve moved away from this bloated ecosystem. Next time I need to write a shopping list, I’ll just use the back of a receipt and then toss it in a recycling bin, maybe I don’t want to remember everything.
