10 Ways I Failed In Using Evernote
Like I wrote in an earlier post, Evernote is a powerful tool. Even so, there are some who think it omnipotent and can be used in any way they like. People like me, for instance. Here are the ways I’ve failed at using Evernote:
1. Using Evernote as a to-do list. Yes, there are check boxes and reminders, but really, Evernote’s not a to-do list unless it’s a very simple one such as a holiday packing list, or a one-off grocery shopping list. You can try using it as one, but it’s too powerful a tool for that. For to-do lists, I use Todoist.
2. Using Evernote as a real-time collaboration tool. When two or more people are working on the same note, you get conflicting notes created, which messes everything up. Evernote can’t do it. Stop trying. That’s what Google Docs is for.
3. Using Evernote for tables. There are tables in Evernote, but it doesn’t do formulae. Until recently, you couldn’t even add a new row or column (but the latest update fixed that). That’s what Google Sheets is for.
4. Using notebooks to organise notes. Coming from a files and folders background, it is tempting to organise notes by folder, the way we organise our Dropbox folders. But that’s not how Evernote works. Similar to Gmail’s labels, Evernote uses tags. This article tells you how.
5. Keeping notebooks all to myself. If tags are used for organising your notes, then what are notebooks for? Notebooks are for sharing. To be specific, notebooks are for sharing information with other people, who may also share their information with you. Evernote may not be collaborative like Google Docs, but make no mistake, it’s still collaborative, especially when several people are working on the same project. Alternatively, you can use shared notebooks to disseminate information as well.
6. Over-organising Evernote. Even if you don’t organise your tags and notebooks, the beauty of Evernote is that it still works. Evernote’s main purpose is to act as a storage of information, much like your brain. You don’t organise your brain, do you? Yet, when you need a piece of information, your brain somehow has the ability to recall it. Evernote is the same. It works, even if you don’t organise it. You just got to throw stuff into it.
7. Not using shortcuts. Shortcuts are awesome. Shortcuts is this sidebar on the left that works like OS X’s Favorites in Finder. You can put a single note, a notebook, or a tag into the shortcuts. Clicking the note shortcut brings up the note. Clicking the notebook shortcut brings up the notebook. Clicking the tag shortcut brings up all the notes with that tag.
8. Over-reliance on OCR. Let’s face it, while Evernote trumpets its OCR ability to read even handwriting, you got to have pretty clear handwriting for it to work properly. (I find that printing in caps helps, but that’s not how I usually write.) Obviously it doesn’t work well for me because I’ve got bad penmanship. I very much prefer to type than write. That said, the OCR is awesome — though it still sometimes fails — to recognise text inside PDFs.
9. Trying too hard to use the other Evernote apps. Because while Hello and Evernote Food are nifty ideas in theory, they’re pretty useless in practice, so much so that even Evernote is discontinuing support for Hello. Because, really, its name card scanning feature is good enough. Skitch, on the other hand, is awesome! (Skitch is used for marking up images and documents.)
10. Keeping Evernote all to myself. As mentioned above, Evernote is collaborative, and that means sharing information. Which prompted me to write this article, because if no one wrote “how to use Evernote” articles and I didn’t read them, the app would still be left unused and I would have missed out so many ways to improve my life.
