PI in the Sky – Paul Irvine

I’m new to GTD in any formal sense, but had been looking for an easy to use todo list meets project tasks meets reminder meets organizer meets external memory brain dump type device.  Like many others, I’ve found that managing all the things that you need to do in a day in this highly accelerated technology driven workplace we live in is much much easier if you externalize all the things that hit you and that you are accountable or responsible for.  Try to keep them in your head, and you are dead!  Until recently, I was an advocate of the really simple spiralbound notepad.  It was easy.  Just scribble what you need, when you need it.  Then spend an hour every day porting notes forward to a new list!  It works, but is limited.  Especially when much of what we want to tag, note, remember, etc., is coming off the web.

Evernote is just one app that aims to help.  I tried several options, from the completely inadequate Outlook tasks and notes features, to Ecco, a PIM that died ten years ago but refuses to die, and Microsoft OneNote.  And researched others.

Ecco had me for a while. It is very flexible, very powerful, and very easy to start with.  Once you get GTD going with it though, much of its power and complexity isn’t really needed.  If I were to develop a new personal information manager application though, I would certainly look to Ecco as a blueprint of some very desirable features. Ecco is an end-of-life product though, with only community support.

OneNote from Microsoft has some nice features.  Some very flexible graphic and text features.  I wasn’t very happy with its search/locate UI though.  You still had to click through result sets.

Evernote on the other hand, combined the best of list management with graphic capture (a cool snagit-like thingy is built in), and the email and browser integration is great.  The ability to set up simple folders to follow the GTD ideas, and tags for context and other random tags for non context grouping was very easy.  And being able to search for text in captured graphics! Very cool.

I’ve seen a few users blog whether Evernote could do reminders or ticklers, and while it doesn’t have a calendar or tickler feature, I have found a very easy way to implement it.  Create a notebook called ‘Appointments’ for example, and then create a new note in there for each appt.  Open the attributes up, and set Subject Date to the appt date/time.  It isn’t obvious but you can switch views using the F10 key to do a single line “list” display… then drag the SubjectDate column to be left most… and sort by it. Ascending.

For one off appts, dentist etc, that’s all that’s needed. And when they are complete, I drag the ‘appt’ to my ‘Done’ folder.   But for recurring appts, say a weekly reminder to prepare my summary status report… as soon as I have completed the task, and update my evernote reminder, I simply update the SubjectDate to the Next Action recurrence date that I need.  Not quite as elegant as a full on tickler but it fits in Evernote, and it fits in the a simple GTD folder model.

I’m looking forward to Evernote expanding its capabilities in the tickler area, but for now this works for me.