This is the 7th post about Evernote on this blog, so obviously this note taking app is an important topic. If the first 6 posts were a lot about how to use Evernote is various situations, this one is different. In this post I made a list of 5 things I would consider changing if I could.
Just would like to mention that I don’t think about changing in the way of repairing something wrong, but rather improving something already great.
1. The ability to further nest notebooks
I have been raised using Windows and files and folders have been tattooed on my brain. Notebooks are somewhat similar with folders, the problem is that I can only nest them on 1 level.
I know that the way to go is with tags, and this is the way I get organized at the moment. For me however this is not a natural way to go because I have to consider 2 things, the notebook (location) and the tag.
2. More than 250 notebooks
As I am writing this article, the Evernote knowledge base tells me that I can have a maximum of 250 personal notebooks, no matter if I am premium or not.
This is closely linked with the 1st point, if I could further nest my notebooks I would need a lot more than 250 for every little box in my head.
3. Real time note editing
I am using joined notebooks for a project I am working on and a problem that I have is conflicting changes. Take into account that the joined notebook is shared only with 2 people. I could imagine what it means to share it with 10, 20 people.
Google Drive on the other hand does a great job when it comes to collaboration and avoiding version conflicts, if editing a note could be somewhat like editing a Google Document, that will be great.
4. Top level tags to show everything bellow
Let’s take an example, I want to nest 3 tags under another one, oranges, peaches and apples under fruits. After doing this I want to see all the notes with the these 3 tags. My intuition tells me that the easiest way to see all notes tagged with these 3 fruits is to open the fruits tag.
Right now this is not the case, when I open the fruits tag it will display all the notes tagged with this single tag and not with the tags nested bellow. This makes the nesting just a way to arrange tags.
5. A way to separate reminders from notes
When Reminders were introduced I was really excited with the idea of using one app for note taking and to do list. I tried it for a while, it did not work for me.
Let me tell you why, most of the tasks that I have to do sound like this: call X, email Y, remind X to do that. These are tasks that have no content, and I want to put only content into Evernote.
I would make reminders separate with tasks, having only the option to link them. Because a review this document task having the document attached is a great feature.
Your turn now
Ok, you’ve seen my opinion, your turn now, how would you change Evernote, let me know in the comments bellow.
Notebooks is a leftover from the Windows Explorer days. The way Evernote
is set up you don’t more than a handful of notebooks: default, shared,
local, special/project, …, with the bulk of your notes located in 1
notebook. The reason: with Evernote search it does not matter if you
define the search in 1 particular notebook, it finds it just as fast. So
I think your point #1 does not make sense if you have really understood
Evernote.
I don’t agree with point 2: if you need more than 250 notebooks you have an organisational problem.
2 points where Evernote should improve:
* colours for tags, notebooks, note background* text editor: the current one is too basic & clunky.
_”if you need more than 250 notebooks you have an organisational problem.”_
No. If MY work system needs 300 notebooks, it is NO problem. It is just MY system. It is different from YOUR system, but BOTH systems are OK. Yours for you, mine for me.
250 notebooks may not be enough for you, but I am pretty sure you are in a very small minority so I doubt Evernote will increase the allowance. But neither I nor anybody outside a small group within Evernote know what their development plans are.
Having said that, you can always make an official feature request. Good luck.
I agree with you, Miroslav…I’m using Google Drive because it doesn’t tell me, “your way of organizing is outdated”. Who’s to judge my organizational method? Me.
This is the A-number-1 reason I left Evernote lying in the dust…and I’ve never been happier. These people who just can’t comprehend the notebook organizational method…or rather, don’t want to…are a non-entity.
I’ve done the tags and I’ve done the notebooks, and it comes down to the same question…tags take more work, so they are a waste of my time. I create a notebook named whatever, and then I drop in notes that mean that to me. No convoluted pathway of naming conventions required.
A notebook organizer in a small minority? Tell that to everyone who ever used and liked the Windows folder system. Evernote chooses to believe we are a minority because that ideology allows them to do things the way they want to do them without regard to what users want.
Don’t waste your time on an official feature request. They just laugh at them and hit the DELETE key.
Tinkicker, what you & the likes of Miroslav try to do when you try a new app is use the way you have been using apps in the years before. The fact that you cannot get used to Evernote’s system shows you are not (yet?) capable of handling something different.
Evernote has more than 100 million users ! Don’t tell me all these people are wasting their time. If Evernote is not for you & Miroslav, then fine. One cannot please every single person on earth, and there is no perfect app. Evernote isn’t perfect either. But don’t condemn it (or anything else for that matter) out of ignorance.
I agree with Tincicker with the fact that tags take more work than folders that we-ve been used to.
I would not judge if someone is capable of handling something different based on a comment on a blog …
I don’t see why tags take more time, in Evernote that is. Seeing that Tinkicker said it perhaps that explains it. Seeing that you agree I really don’t understand.
Working with tags takes requires me to be more careful how I name and nest the tags. Besides that, moving a file from a folder to another is easier than adding a new tag and removing the other one. This is why I said tags are more cumbersome, that does not mean that I don’t use them however.
Seeing that i said it? What are you, six? You dont even know me.
What did i say for you to consider me “the likes of”? I didn’t say I COULDN’T get used to Evernote’s tagging…I did get used to it over the last three years and didn’t like it so I won’t use it. So that makes me ignorant?
In that case I guess you’re in the same intelligence-deficient classification because you use tags and not notebooks.
The people I’m speaking against above are NOT ones who use tags…but the ones who call me ignorant for using notebooks. Of which you are one.
Sounds pretty ignorant.
Support of Markdown:
* you type a markdown-based note
* you select all the note, right-clik -> Preview and Evernote either (1) launches its own markdown rendering engine or (2) through the Preferences, launches you loved Markdown editor (Byword, …)
Nesting too deep has shown ptoblematic since when you go back to that specific project after couple of years you will find it hard to find staf… (you want have the same categorisnig idea as to when you started the project)
Instead i would sugest organising yourself with note names (or file names on pc) …
Personally i hate it when i open a folder and all i see is other folders… so i have to dig in further.
Hyperlinks to searces/tags:
If i find one tag I would like to explore, today I have to manually search for it. Why not click and get the search option?
Saves searches are saved way down on the left menu. I would like to put a seach hyperlink on the top of every main project note to find all related notes
I would like a Calendar that sync’s with google