my note-taking journey during the last weeks
As you may or not, I am using Evernote (EN) for a long time now. Including a 3-year break because of shiny object syndrome I am using Evernote since the summer of 2017, but getting back in July last year helped to gain some new perspectives.
I read Tiago Fortes‘s “Building a second brain” at that time and took a deep reflection on my approach to personal knowledge management (PKM). I got rid of shiny object syndrome and went back to EN from Obsidian. I established a modified version of PARA, as mentioned in the book. I wanted to go simple, so I just used Ticktick and the personal plan of Evernote. I´ve experimented a little and just used the web clipper extensively.
I ended up with approx. 4.4 notes and having more or less every information several times in my system. EN became slow as hell and was barely functioning. I did a bit of merging in November 2022 but still had like 3.3 notes. I wasn´t using a read-it-later app and ended with 4.1k notes and a laggy system again in February 2023.
So it was time for a major change. I spend most of January and February 2023 finding a read-it-later app I enjoy and bought a premium subscription for Instapaper in late February. Thereafter my real decluttering journey began.
At first, I set up a few rules for my decluttering and focused on removing every online content which I haven´t commented on, highlighted, summarized, or linked to other notes. I put them into Instapaper. I merged notes I used as digital photo albums, photos of old journals, digital receipts, etc. as much as possible. I decided to become ignorant of some topics and deleted all notes related to them instantly. I summarized a lot of stuff, especially Twitter threads. With 1–2 words of the author in my summary, I´ve deleted the original Twitter notes in 90% of the cases I deleted far more duplicates and triplicates than I want to admit. I excluded pdf workbooks and ebooks to store them in my cloud storage and use it with my tablet in the future. Especially the habit of creating summary notes for the majority of the notebooks was useful. It wasn´t applicable for all notebooks, but for like 80%+. It ended up with the fact that I could actually merge several notebooks and still have a comfortable amount of notes in them, which are like 30–40 for me.
I became obsessed with this decluttering project for several weeks. I guess I spend like 30h per week during 3ish weeks with that project, despite having full-time online training with exams. Initially, I thought I would only spend a few weeks with this and then “finally start to live/using this system”… In the end, I used this project as procrastination for not writing any job application for two weeks, despite being unemployed since August last year. I became extremely focussed on the number and my part-time OCD kicked in.
It ended with the fact that EN wasn´t properly working anymore and I needed to upgrade my subscription because my included data volume was used up. Aka: no sync and no more cloud storage for notes. So I upgraded my subscription for the next months, as my yearly subscription fee will be due in July. For reference: in a normal month I used 3–5 GB of the 10 GB included in the personal plan. Now I am using premium and paid like 20€ extra for the upcoming months.
I announced that I called this project “complete” in a Twitter post on 8th March. Overall, this project has taught me several important lessons. The most important one is the fact that I tend to overconsume and under-create. I´ve written about my bad habit of treating note-taking as a hobby in the past, so I don´t want to go too deep into the topic here.
Now I´m focussing on developing a healthier approach for PKM and using the information there. I started an English Twitter account and became more mindful of my note-taking approach. I try to use this account as a place for experimenting with content creation, sharing interesting articles and youtube videos, and for a bit of self-promotion of course.
One useful habit I developed during this decluttering period was journaling in English almost every day. A lot of my insights about my PKM came from these journaling sessions. I´ve used my E-ink tablet for a few weeks for this. But currently, I am using a foundation pen with a different color in my journal. Most of the time a journaling session lasts 10–20 mins.
As you may know, my native language is German. After finishing reading the famous book Meditations by Marcus Aurelius I´ve decided to give journaling in a foreign language a try. The roman emperor was a native speaker of Latin but wrote his diary in Greek, so I thought it was pretty inspiring. And the last week approved that it´s a nice habit worth adopting. By incident, I developed this habit on the side with my decluttering journey. Which is a nice outcome.
So, what´s next?
After calling my decluttering project complete, I go through the web pages saved in Instapaper. I try to set a timer so that I don´t spend more than 1h a day going through the content there. Maybe 2h on days off. I archive like 90% of the stuff. I guess in the end I´ll only add 100ish notes back to EN, but only those with highlights.
I am working on a new set of rules concerning what is better written down in my paper journal, which is developing into a part-time commonplace book right now. I am developing some new rules for my PKM system with the focus of being more mindful concerning what is worth adding to the system and adding more own thoughts/summaries/creating more connections.
On the side, I am decluttering my virtual inboxes. I have oversubscribed to newsletters and productivity-related content. Now I force myself to unsubscribe from at least one E-mail list or one account on social media every day. It´s a slow journey but after a month already start feeling the benefits.
And on the side, I learned that I don´t need a to-do list app. Funnily Evernotes included functions are all I need. So bye bye, Ticktick and Morgen. I´ve outgrown you. It was a nice time, but it´s over now.
So what are your thoughts about note-taking? Are you using your system for working on your projects or is it just a form of fancy procrastination to feel productive?
