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Contents
Focus
‘Focus’ is (IMHO) the ultimate way to organise Evernote note-taking (alongside various other ‘helper’ apps) for the most efficient and effective management of your data and your time.
It is possible that – if you have a limited number of notes – you could manage to do this with the ‘free’ versions of Evernote Basic and the various other helper apps I’ll mention later. If you have more detailed needs, one or more subscriptions will be necessary.
If you possibly can, I’d urge you to pay for all these apps, because that guarantees that they’ll continue to be able to provide you (and me!) with their services, plus you will have access to support should you need it.
TANSTAAFL people: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!
Full disclosure - I have no connection with any of these companies or services except as a subscriber.
Disclaimer: While Mac & iOS users may be able to convert some of the comments here for their own use, this is an unashamedly Windows-based desktop system.
(sorry/ not sorry...)
The Eureka Moment
That led to this point… actually wasn’t so much of a watershed moment as a process. Over the past few decades I’ve gone through more ‘productivity’ apps and systems than many people have had hot dinners.
Finally in the past few weeks my unconscious mind – possibly impatient with my just not getting it already – has been hatching a system which seems to me to a pretty good answer to my needs, and I’m moving towards implementing that system in full as we speak. (Metaphorically)
I wasn’t taking a bath at the time of my revelation, and felt no need to run through the streets naked, shouting "Eureka"
...For which those reading this can be truly grateful, and all who know me should definitely avoid the ensuing mental image (or urgently seek appropriate counselling)
I feel the need to share though, so buckle up – this might take 3,000 words or so…
Implementation
Welcome to the cart. The horse will be along shortly.
There’s a reason (honest!) for talking about how we’re going to use this system before we even get around to explaining what it actually entails.
Whether you’re coming at this (as I did) with the burning embers of your failing database smoking the sky behind you and chaos threatening to overwhelm1
-Or you’re just starting out with a fresh, new and mostly empty system and looking to start fresh. The process I’m about to explain can either be set up alongside a huge existing system and be gradually brought into play, or it can be implemented pretty much in full - although in either case setting up and maintaining the rules that process and store notes will be an ongoing task.
You won’t know for example that you need to process notes relating to that foreign holiday until the year you intend to take it - but when you do, you can create a new notebook for the notes and set up new rules to collect and store the updates and queries and then sit back and enjoy your break in peace.
This is an ‘emergent system’ - something that grows naturally and exponentially, helping develop its own rules - like evolution!
Read the details below and (hopefully) you’ll see what I mean.
1 I do have this tendency to over-dramatize things sometimes…
The Set Up
I might have mentioned that I’ve been around for a while – so of course I have a ton of notes taken BF (‘before Focus’).
To avoid compromising anything I now do with stuff I did before, I introduced some unique name prefixes for Stacks, Notebooks and Tags.
- ||<Stack> – contains notebooks
- |!<Notebook> – for notes relating to more than one ‘focus’
- |<Notebook> – for items related to one single ‘focus’
- x<Tag> - names with a unique prefix to be different from any previous schemes, and any other indexed words
In case that's not clear, the prefixes are: 2 vertical bars, 1 bar+!, 1 bar, and a low-case "x"
These new terms were initially a way to differentiate the new system from the (many) older ones I still had in use, but I quickly found that having them meant in many cases just typing three or four characters into one or another search box to get a very short list of the options available.
Plus - while "|Ama" searches would pop up |Amazon in short order, I could also create a few dummy notebooks to highlight different sections when reviewing the list in the left window of the desktop and web apps.
In Windows its also possible to use colour and emphasis to make a name stand out.
What’s a ‘Focus’??
OK I’m not being fair here. We’re embarked on a long and rambling explanation of how the world works, and I haven’t introduced you to the most important conclusion.
While for the longest time I relied on the search feature in Evernote to find my required content from a single notebook that contained the majority of my notes, I realised that the first element of my search was always to look for a specific term.
I’d be looking for notes referring to the company I’d recently emailed, or the person I spoke to, or the project I wanted to update.
These items were the unique ‘focus’ of my search
The same terms cropped up in my searches again and again... I even had saved searches for many of them.
So I decided to create a separate notebook to hold all notes concerning each individual focus – one where I could see the notes it contained already sorted into date order (provided the dates were in the title)
My concerns about the latest progress in Project X would usually be satisfied by looking at the most recent notes in that notebook.
Sidebar 1: Titles
For more or less ever I’ve been adding a date to my note titles. Not the date that the note was created, nor the date on which is was last updated. (Both are baked into Evernote’s note metadata)
My dates would be the dates of upcoming webinars / when emails were sent / when documentation was received – which would often not be the same as when the note was created.
My note titles are [date] - [type] - [focus] - [keywords] where:
- date - yyyymmdd
- type- letter / email / receipt / leaflet / user guide / webinar
- focus- name of the person or company sending or receiving content, or the project featured in it
- keywords- anything else that came to mind
As the title led with the date of the content, all I have to do is ‘sort by title’ to get an accurate (-ish) timeline.
Back to Naming
There’s an exception
I don’t want to have a notebook for every possible destination in the world, or every variation on a pizza!
As mentioned above one of my notebook types is "|![name]" as in |!RoadTrip or |!Recipes - to signify that there are many different focii (focuses?) for this notebook.
Those individual focii are identified by the xTags attached to the notes.
There’s more - I use PayPal for purchases, so does my PayPal receipt for an Amazon purchase go into my single-focus |PayPal or my single-focus |Amazon notebook?
In practice what I do is to count that as part of the Amazon transaction, so it goes there - but I’ll tag it "xPayPal" so I can find that view easily.
That decision was purely subjective and it could easily have gone the other way.
Where you have any such matters to decide - pick your own solution.
As long as you’re consistent it’ll be fine. (There are ways to ensure consistency - be patient; read on…)
Sidebar 2: Tags
I hate tags. They’re like weeds, or possibly rabbits – one day you have a dozen, the next time you look there are thousands of the darn things. Unless you have cast-iron rules for what tags are in use, and when they are applied, you’re going to get to Tag Overload. Trust me: been there, done that - I have that badly-fitting t-shirt.
I also have around 1,000 tags from previous attempts to apply a coherent system. Some of them are actually useful – I have an ongoing practice of correcting titles and applying tags if simple searches produce too many hits.
I’ll refine the search so it looks for ‘intitle:
Then I’ll save that search for future use.
But now I need a new and separate list of tags to discriminate between the sources and destinations for my road trips and the content of my recipes. So I introduced the ‘x-tag’.
Whatever keyword I apply as a tag gets a prefix of ‘x’ - so xPizza, xSeaside etc joined the team. And again, ‘xP’ will (usually) generate a surprisingly short list of options from which I can choose my required term.
Silent Running
That’s an awesome sci-fi film from the 70’s – also the way I like my systems to run… eventually...
We know where everything is supposed to go now, so no bars to finding and filing any information within Evernote.
Everything I now process goes into an ||Index stack to keep it separate from all the stuff I still need to deal with. (I’m actually at 50% -or so- of 50,000 notes and counting…)
Stuff that belongs to a specific person, company or project goes to a |[focus] notebook with an appropriate title; and things that are research against a possible future need to destinations or recipes go to my |![mixed] notebooks with added x[Tags] to make it easier to split out specific destinations or dishes.
"But how" you may ask2, "do we make it as easy as possible to file everything away as efficiently as possible?"
2 at least, I hope you did - because I’m gonna tell you anyway…
I think it’s pretty clear. We need some helpers. Suggestions coming up...
Your email client of choice
Whatever email client you use, there will be three levels of email.
- Spam
- Information you might need
- Important stuff
Spam is easy – delete it with extreme prejudice
Information you might need – can be saved to Evernote; possibly in one of those |![mixed] notebooks in case of future need.
Everything else - read and delete. If in doubt - forward (manually) to Evernote.
My general rule is - unless there's a very good reason NOT to save something - it goes in.
Disk space is pretty cheap. (But beware that emails can contain lots of enticing images and they can occupy a lot of space, especially if you're working off Evernote Basic's Note size and Upload limits).
The Important Stuff is also easy (in a way) – it’s from someone or about something that clearly should be a named |[notebook]
So forward those emails (if you’re a subscriber) to your Evernote email address.
If your email client allows you to do so, you can set up a rule to find and forward specific emails and (maybe) add a subject including tags and notebook details per How to save email into Evernote
If that’s not possible don’t worry – an app called Filterize (see below) can help with incoming email notes. Just forward your emails to the Evernote default notebook.
Backupery
Having spent some time setting up the ‘perfect’ system to handle your data, you’d be devastated if anything happened to lose or corrupt it. So we need to backup the database - ideally daily.
Backupery is a (paid for) awesome Windows app that will (duh) backup your entire Evernote database to ENEX files (one per notebook) on a schedule you can set. (It supports many other packages too!)
Apart from anything else, the fact that Backupery creates a folder full of files named for your notebooks means it’s fairly easy to copy the file list to add to another application.
Copying file lists however tends to be hard unless you have a free utility called….
Karen’s Directory Printer
Karen Kenworthy produced some awesome Windows software before she sadly passed away in 2011.
This particular app (still being supported) will take a Windows folder and print its visible contents to file in various formats – which is a great way to copy a long list of notebook names if you happen to have them saved in Backupery.
Workflowy
This actually involves two apps – Workflowy and a chrome extension Wfx for Workflowy which makes jumping around (and much more) in Chrome (the browser) and chrome clones like Brave and Vivaldi.
Workflowy is an ‘outline’ app with a lot of attitude. It’s the place to put your saved list of notebooks from Backupery, because it’s much easier to search and find notebook names, see lists of xTags (which you can save with each notebook name) and save the titles you use in that notebook to avoid having to re-type the boring bits manually.
The app is the ideal helper if you’re scanning paper (or anything else) into notes, or creating new notes from scratch.
New note titles and tags may already be available to copy and paste from the app – or can be added for the next new note to that notebook.
And if you need consistency… I use the Workflowy listing of my notebooks as a framework for adding (forinstance) an "xPayPal" entry under the "|Amazon" notebook heading so that next time I encounter the "purchased from A, paid for by B" issue, I just search for the names in my Workflowy listing to see which way around I filed them last time.
Workflowy will do an amazing amount more than ‘just’ be the outliner that Evernote doesn’t (at the time of writing) provide. You should explore the options available - whether or not you decide to use it as part of this system!
Filterize
This is the Big One. (Well it is for me, anyway!)
Filterize will scan new notes as they are added to the system – by email forinstance.
Depending on the title or content of the incoming note Filterize can move it to a notebook, add new tags, or add information – like an extracted date – to the title.
There’s a magic process called ‘parameterization’ where an Evernote note is set up with a table and columns for the search term, plus extra columns for tags, notebooks names and the like.
Each row in the table can hold different data. As Filterize finds each note that matches one of the row search terms, it will apply the tags, move the note and take whatever extra action is required.
If you look down a list of unprocessed notes – the ones that would up in the default notebook rather than being sent to a specific Focus – it’s possible to add new parameters on the fly to that table so that the next note with those details will be processed properly.
And last, but definitely not least, we have...
Text Expanders
This is a type of application rather than a specific one, because there are suddenly a lot around.
My goal is to make life as easy and efficient as possible (not 'be the laziest person on the planet' - that's more of a daydream...
"Text Expanders" can take a simple keyboard action like Ctrl+D and turn that into the current date in YYYYMMDD format with or without a time stamp, or can take Ctrl+T and generate a several-line template to standardise a note layout. Key combinations are user-definable.
Some pre-saved content can stop execution of the paste at a certain point so you can add extra comments.
I add dates (forinstance) to a lot of titles, so a quick key code to insert the current information is ideal.
My Text Expanders of choice are:
"software that manages frequently used text templates for insertion into any program." Windows only.
Text Blaze - browser add-in from your web store. Does as much as PE but with a more accessible interface. (IMHO) - Chrome browsers, anywhere.
Text Blaze is more accessible and user-friendly (IMHO) but only affects the browser display area. I need PE to type in Evernote.
Prioritization
By this point we’ve dealt with setting up a framework of notebooks, titles and tags to accommodate anything you need to throw at it; the various ways to expedite the throwing process, whether by forwarding emails, clipping web pages or manually creating new content.
And your database is probably growing by exponential leaps and bounds… so how do you deal with all this information???
Believe or not, the forgoing 2000 words or so has just been about a main principle of GTD.
If you’re not familiar by now with the principles of David Allen's Getting Things Done® you should be Googling the details madly!
I’m referring to the ‘get it out of your head and put it on a list somewhere’ theory. Don’t worry about things that are coming up – just concentrate on the task at hand and get that finished.
Then go on to the next on your list.
Dashboards / Tables of Content
A(nother) nice thing that Filterize can do is to maintain a real-time Table of Contents note. Create a note (forinstance) headed NOW! and give Filterize a set of rules by which it can select certain notes (like tag = ‘now’ AND incomplete task due date is Today or earlier) and that note will be added to your immediate priority list, even if it arrived as an auto-forwarded email today.
Similarly you can assign (in a parameterization note, or elsewhere) tags for ‘soon’ and ‘sometime’ (for things that are coming up) and add in extra tests like ‘notes with uncompleted due dates of today or earlier’ or ‘notes with due dates in the next 7 days’ - and it is possible to create a structure of notes, tags and priority lists that will allow you to concentrate on clearing the current task, plus any additional work that might be available.
In the Filterize universe, these are called ‘dashboards’ - but around here, we’re firmly based in reality: they’re Tables of Content.
In Theory...We’ve described a way in which – provided you set up the infrastructure correctly – all relevant inbound information from whatever source will be assigned to the correct notebook with the appropriate tags.
All due dates will be recognized by a notification to the user on a list which does not go away until the entry (or at least the due date) is processed in some way.
All you need to do is to check your:
- Email inbox(es) for unhandled messages
- Default notebook for unprocessed notes
- Priority lists for urgent and important tasks
- Repeat as necessary…
There will necessarily be a lot of these at first, but as time goes on this will be a very quick check to make
This has been a high-level explanation of the basics, and (probably) some more detail will be required. Hope this helps in the meantime. More (maybe) later!
Honourable Mention
This goes to Typora which is a minimal Markdown editor that you might find interesting and useful. It helped me write these blog pages anyway!
Security
It won’t have escaped your notice that your personal, private, and very precious data is being processed by various bodies in addition to Evernote.
There’s probably another thousand-word post in here about the degree of exposure involved with data being processed by third parties, and whether or not your plans for World Domination might get leaked to some shadowy lizard-run secret society.
The short form - any processing through these third parties is at least as safe as any internet-based transaction; if you really don’t want your data to be ‘out there’, it shouldn’t be online (or at least in Evernote) in the first place!
As a last note on the helpers…I’ve explained what they do, but haven't gone into any detail yet on the how – which would have made this long harangue into something that might have been even more indigestible.
If you need help to set these things up… I refer you to my opening comments...
If you pay for an app you will generally get help (from them) if you need it!
Good luck on all the above - I can't promise to react to any comments you may add here, but I will always read them.