How I ended my love affair with Evernote and switched to OneNote

Phil is the VP of Sales at MyVega, father of two, and an avid Crossfit junkie. Entrepreneur at heart, he is focused on maximizing the value of his time by using tools that make his life easier, and more productive.

Evernote radically changed my life.

It made managing my meetings and communications easy and available across all my platforms (iPad, iPhone, Lenovo laptop, and PC workstation). I immediately loved the ability to move emails, documents, and have a page for continuous typing meeting notes. It allowed me to have all my key discussion points from my meetings in one simple spot for reference. I loved the notebooks and pages you could add.

I found it so powerful that I encouraged all my direct reports and colleges to use it as a way to better organize our management system (previously, we were using Outlook tasks).

I had this utopian dream I was the master of follow up. Then reality hit me hard. I was missing some items and not following up on everything as well as I would normally do because I couldn’t easily find them. The issue was there were multiple items on multiple pages to follow up on that I would eventually miss some. So my super organizational tool made me more unorganized. A sad day for me, a great day for those I follow up with.

After using Evernote for a year, I emailed them to suggest a change to allow date based activity follow up, much like Microsoft Outlook tasks. Unfortunately, it wasn’t part of their product roadmap — a disappointing day for me as I had invested so much time into the this tool. Then I knew I needed something different and there was no point in continuing my love affair with Evernote.

Welcome to OneNote.

This year, our IT team introduced me to OneNote 2013, and it immediately solved my problem. Not only does it offer the same functionality as Evernote, it has the follow ups!

OneNote’s functionalities are far superior in ways I would have thought to be annoying if I hadn’t been a hardcore user — features such as “type anywhere”, linking to Outlook tasks, flagging items, attachments, formatting, notebooks, tabs and pages!

Why do I love these functionalities?

“Type anywhere” is something that takes some time getting used to when you live in the world of Microsoft Word where you are forced to type within the boundary of the page and you have very specific margins. It does take you a bit of time to get accustomed to the idea that you can type wherever you want. And it gets even better if you, like me, run a Lenovo Yoga which allows you to pinch and zoom so you can see more of a single page.

But the type anywhere feature is awesome. You can type in different spaces around a single idea or project or anywhere you want. Think back to university and to writing in the margin, or header or even overtop of words in text books. That freedom to express your ideas hasn’t been possible before in digital format.

Linking to Outlook tasks and flagging items is the number one reason why I moved. I use OneNote to manage my meetings and follow up items as its primary purpose. I have a notebook for each direct report and tabs based on various projects we are working on. Each tab has items (email, documents, notes) and I can flag any of those as follow up. A simple “find flags” button in OneNote allows me to find them and make sure they are discussed. If I need to follow up outside of our regular meeting, I can easily link them to tasks and follow up on the day required. I am sure everyone hates my super follow up, but it makes what I do much easier and more effective.

Attachments and formatting are more of a cosmetic thing. Back when I was using Evernote, copying something out of it and pasting into Word resulted in something the technology gods from the 80′s would dream up to give me. Horrible mess of margin errors and wingdings. What the heck is a wingding?

OneNote works and formats just like Word. It is beautiful, familiar and doesn’t leave me in the fetal position when I try to insert a spreadsheet into the note. In fact, the spreadsheet works and operates just like it would in Excel. Oh and you can share the note and spreadsheet for collaborative working. Boom.. Mind blown, I know.

The last little item is just the general look and feel of the tools. Evernote looks and feels like it is an app designed to work for people who don’t really work. OneNote is well thought out, feels familiar, intuitive and designed for you to work in. Evernote has books and pages, OneNote has books, tabs and pages. That extra layer is so useful for taking notes during recurring meetings — you can create a new page for each meeting. It allows it to be both visually nice and tight, and easy to navigate.

I have used both app functions on my phone and iPad, and the OneNote app has the same functionality advantages as the desktop platform.

If you are on a Mac OS I feel sorry for you, but if you are on a Microsoft platform, check out OneNote, it will change the way you’re working.