Interesting Article on Organizing Information

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 13, 2015 at 01:07 PM

That is an interesting article, good food for thought. For the same reasons the author states, I’ve been skeptical of tagging as the primary organizational tool, at least for me. The idea of processing information the way the author describes it is intriguing. Like Hugh, I’m not convinced that Evernote is the best tool for this kind of work, which brings me to taking exception to this claim at the start of the article (made, apparently by the editor at Evernote, and not the author):

“From Michael Hyatt to Thomas Honeyman, thousands upon thousands of you have relied on tags as your primary organizational system. But, the power of Evernote is in its flexibility.”

The power of Evernote is that it makes it easy to capture data and keep it accessible on virtually any device. But Evernote is no more flexible than any other note-manager and is less so than others because of its limited notebook hierarchy. I give the EN people credit for running such an extensive article that mostly nullifies their primary organization scheme. I wonder if it is a set up to big changes they are planning to the app.

But that’s a digression. The point of the article is that you need to interact with your information—at least the information that you capture for creative purposes. That’s an invigorating idea. But it definitely suggests a note system different than what Evernote does well. I would think a system that supported this iterative interaction would have these features:

1. An excellent editor.
2. The ability to annotate the text in a number of ways.
3. A facility to save versions of the information—you might want to refer to the original or see how your thinking about it evolved.
4. Quick and easy browsing of information so you can make those unexpected connections—if you have to search for it, that means you are expecting them.

Not sure such a note-taker currently exists. But it makes me want to find one that does.

Steve Z.