Apps can be like girlfriends. They look amazing and they promise to do things you need. Some apps are really great and may stay in your life. Others you quickly discard as you realize they do not fit you. There is a third class of app that is very frustrating. These apps, like ex-girlfriends, are apps that you will stick with for a very long time, because what they offer is so close to what you need, but some key component is missing. It can take a lot of frustration and struggle before you realize that.

The great thing about technology is that it doesn’t have feelings. That’s why your computer has a trash button instead of a well-written apology button. In addition, you can combine one piece of technology with another to make it better. Consider yourself lucky if you are dating someone who works like that.

I would like to talk about two applications in my life that don’t quite work.

One is Evernote. Evernote is amazing. You can scan business cards with your cellphone and it automatically reads the text and saves it in a document. Because the software is cloud based, you can access your work from any machine. It reads text from pictures if it can. You can search through your own documents really easily. You can tag things or put things in notebooks and view them that way as well. It has a companion web clipper app where you can stick web articles right into a relevant project. It also gives suggestions for similar articles you’ve saved in Evernote.

The problem is that I am not an organized person, and I don’t have a natural tendency to use those features the way they are intended to be used. I rarely review my Evernote documents. There is no place where old material goes to retire. Evernote is like a messy room that I don’t know how to clean. Because of that, I don’t use it very often. Unfortunately, its competitor Google Docs is not much better.

Part of my issue is that when I want to read something and learn about it, I get distracted by being on the computer, and start doing something else. This renders the point of suggested articles useless because I go to Facebook instead. I basically want to read through the internet offline. Lucky for me, Amazon already figured that out.

Amazon has a similar web clipper that sends articles to your Kindle. But, it has the exact same problem as Evernote! Everything arrives in a giant pile. In addition, it’s hard to sort the articles and deleting them is a pain in the ass. 1 book (1 file) on a Kindle may be 300 pages. Conversely, 300 pages of web articles may be anywhere from 30–100 files. In addition, the Kindle web grabbing app auto names the articles. They can have strange names that don’t relate to the subject matter. The Kindle screen shows about 10 files at a time. So if you are putting a bunch of research on there it fills up your device really quickly in a very frustrating way.

It’s important to document these kinds of failures, because it really helps you figure out exactly why these things in your life do not work. It also gives you avenues to look for solutions. You can then detail what it would take to get to those solutions.

For example, you can notice a trend and a goal in what I am trying to do. I am essentially trying to condense specific parts of the internet and my own personal writings into a book that I can read on my Kindle. The parts where I am running into trouble are organizing everything. In an ideal world, I would pop things into Evernote, organize them there (in batches,) and then save entire notebooks as one giant file into my Kindle. You can annotate things on a Kindle, so in a reverse fashion, I would be able to take all of my notes that I took while reading and throw them back onto Evernote. This solution would require that I actually contact people at Evernote and make this suggestion. So, in a very meta way, I will submit this blog post to them to read.

Alternatively, while they are working on that, or if they ignore this suggestion, I will have to find a personal solution to that problem. One would be just sitting down and organizing my digital work piece by piece. I can compile notes into one large Google Doc, or Evernote file and then save them in a format that my Kindle can read. This would take a long time and is not very exciting to me, but I know it would achieve what I am looking to do.

If you have any ideas in this respect, or have other issues you are working through, please put them in the comments below!

P.S. Evernote peeps, my ideal world would be using something like Xendo + Mohiomap to batch add things to a notebook and then being able to autocompile them into a single document that can be a) sent to my Kindle or b) automatically printed and mailed to my house through Evernote as a one off book from lulu.com.