Information conveniently captured in Evernote; now what?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 27, 2013 at 08:49 PM

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread. I’ve found several important and useful insights even though my own perspective is closer to Vince’s. I’ll try to explain:

First of all, as for Vince, capture for me is king: I do much of my reading via RSS in my Android phone’s Google Reader (yeah, I know, this will change) while commuting. I also need to capture some emails, Google+ or Linkedin posts, online articles, downloaded PDFs, you name it. Even though following developments is extremely important in my line of work, I simply have no time to search for information; I need to capture it as soon as it crosses my path. For this, I have found nothing comparable to Evernote in convenience and ubiquity.

I have amassed more than 10,000 articles in Evernote which I can search/filter as fast as I can type. Once you get that much info into a convenient tool the added value grows exponentially. I’m sure other tools like Zoot could fit the bill equally well. However, I cannot have Zoot on my Android phone. Or my Linux laptop.

Further, what Zoot and most other personal databases cannot do is share. I work with a team, and being able to share found info with them is also very important. Evernote makes this very simple with shared or public notebooks.

Going back to Vince’s original workflow, I would add in my case a very important step, something like Dr Andus’ firewall, which I would call Filter. When capture is as easy as it is with Evernote, one is bound to collect a whole bunch of unrelated information. Before proceeding to any kind of synthesis, I would need to only promote the relevant information items.

1) Capture
2) Filter
3) Synthesize
4) Produce

Evernote makes this relatively easy: one can filter and select at will and then export only those items as HTML. What is then needed is a program which monitors a folder in order to automatically import the relevant items. I have not found the ideal one yet, but there are several options.

As Vince said, Evernote is a platform, as is Outlook. For years I have relied on Outlook’s calendar without ever using Outlook itself—other programs could access it directly and provide a more convenient interface. I believe that with Evernote’s popularity someone will eventually build a convenient synthesis system around it. There are already some interesting experiments, such as TuskTools http://www.moreproductivenow.com/tusktools_calendar.html

To be clear, I do not envisage doing everything in one program. But I do envisage simple integration. Steve, the example you provided of taking an outline through several tools hit the nail on the head (as did several other points you made). This is something I do myself often with outlines and plain text files. But it is not very easy to do with collections of items, as exemplified by Graham’s efforts to escape from the Brain. ConnectedText may be a brilliant synthesis tool, but moving info into it seems a pain.