The following article, posted in the Evernote blog, while ostensibly written around using Evernote to manage information, seems to me to be sufficiently broad and interesting, to apply to any attempt to organize information and creative thought. It discusses the limitations of tagging information and proposes an alternative way to mark information as valuable. I found it to be both stimulating and thought provoking. I hope that others will also find it of value.

https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/12/11/evernote-and-the-brain-designing-creativity-workflows/

Mark

Yes, a very interesting article. Thank you for it.

On the basis of a single reading, I'm not entirely convinced by all its arguments - particularly in regard to the potential role of Evernote in one's mental toolbox - but I'll have to think about them. And anything that quotes Richard Feynman favourably starts with Brownie points, in my view.

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.

Very good article -- thought provoking.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

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.

I would add "Intelligent search or other feature that suggests related / similar content".

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

Is it necessary to have a single tool for this? I tend to think "no". It's more interesting to have lots of tools in the shop.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

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.

Well, there is the one you got me hooked on, Steve, a while ago ;-)

Doesn't OneNote do all of these things in Steve's list -- more or less?

-----------------------------

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.

DevonThink.

I posted the link to the article because I too thought its value extended well beyond Evernote. In fact, I think Evernote's strength is to help catalogue the "dumb information," a process the article devalues. But what software is good for the opposite: "Creating a cognitive environment that promotes creativity."

For a few years, I journaled daily in Circus Ponies NoteBook, with each month as a separate page. The value NoteBook brought to this enterprise was that each paragraph was a separate cell. If I searched for my thoughts on DEVONthink across the year, I got only those cells discussing DEVONthink, and not the preceding cell which my have reflected how my day had gone. At the same time, I did a weekly brain dump into Curio, with each week as a separate Idea Space. At the end of the year I re-read my entries in both. I was stunned. They could have been written by two different people. While the NoteBook pages reflected primarily dominant hemisphere thinking (many technical ideas about software, for example), the Curio Idea Spaces were far more creative, reflective of thoughts about mediation, spirituality and design. Odd!

So reading the linked article reinforces for me the strengths of Curio with its ability to create graphic text, lists, mind maps, while being supported by an inbuilt ability to find appropriate web images to reinforce content. More than any program, it supports the spatial organization of information, by allowing all of these on a single Idea Space. It also supports annotation of rich text, web clips and PDF's, a process the article also praises.

I am glad that others are also finding the article of value.

A very interesting read - thanks for providing this.

As I read through it and focus in particular on the position on tagging content, I found myself in agreement with the position the author took. My biggest challenge with tagging is that while I may tag something, I don't always later on recall why I tagged it the way I did (note: I tend not to use obvious tags like "Reviews", "Vendors", etc.). Who knows - maybe old age is to blame. But overall, I find most tagging solutions to not work effectively for me.

What I found ironic was the article was posted on Evernote's site, and I consider the no-longer-supported desktop Evernote 2.2 to posses one of the most effective tagging solutions I've ever encountered. Interestingly, the approach Evernote 2.2 offered specifically avoids many of the pitfalls of traditional tagging as noted in the article. For those that may not be familiar with it, Evernote 2.2 tagging worked as follows:

1) Create a tag
2) Specify keywords and conditions that will result in an item being tagged (keywords, location, etc).
3) Enable the tag rule.

After setting up a few tag rules using the above, the real magic would start to happen. Each new item that was added would have the tag rules applied and the appropriate tag applied. What was special was that there was a dynamic tag hierarchy created and displayed that let you explore related items that you might not have even known existed. Because tags were dynamically assigned based on rules and not hard-coded on items, the tag hierarchy represented a living "relationship engine". It was an incredibly powerful function, and was unfortunately deprecated once the Evernote 2.2 app (still available but no longer supported) was shut down in favor of their current tool approach. The user forum screamed when this feature was removed from Evernote 3, and they lost many aficionados (me included). Zoot has a somewhat similar assignment rules engine, but without the elegancy of the dynamic content tag hierarchy feature. I've yet to find another tool that has the features, speed and flexibility of the Evernote 2.2 tagging system.

How ironic to find - hosted on Evernote - an article that disparages static tagging..... when they originally had a solution that addresses many of the issues noted in the article....