How to Switch From Evernote to Obsidian

are you in a relationship with Evernote and wondering if it's turned toxic did you jump in because the water was warm but now with slower speeds higher costs and strangers looking at your data you suddenly feel trapped in hot water here are the three signs that your relationship with Evernote has become toxic and three things that you can look for in a new thinking partner then if you're ready to go through with it we'll cover exactly how to break up with Evernote and move in with your new best friend obsidian three signs it got toxic your partner is stalking you you started noticing that it's tracking your every action create a note Evernote knows so for me to show you this let's hop into obsidian now so Evernote Knows What You Did Last Summer I'm going to twirl this down and show you a PDF and I've highlighted something I'd like us to read through together but first you can save a PDF in obsidian here and then I'm linking to specific sections here so what I want to draw your attention to is actions you perform when using the Evernote survey is creating a note sharing a note and who knows what else because they don't go further did you ever integrate your contacts with Evernote you likely did and now Evernote knows everyone you know sure leave your phone with me so if we look in the context section we can see that Evernote may use your contacts to auto complete email addresses essentially what they're saying is you should give us all your contacts information because we can do this one helpful thing for you but in reality you've essentially just kept your phone unlocked and crossed your fingers at your dangerously possessive partner doesn't start scrolling through all your contacts good luck with that and the last part of this stalking is that Evernote can use your words against you in ways that you're not even aware of what does that mean exactly so would someone at Evernote ever view my content and then they talk about reasons when this might happen and then they have a huge disclaimer at the bottom that says this policy is not intended to apply to our use of aggravated de-identified and anonymized data so essentially they're saying we might look at it in these situations and also we might look at it in these situations which is everything so I have little little trust in Evernote this is a partner that is stalking you let's go over to number two hey by the way I'm Nick Milo and I'm here to help you get your thoughts in order so you can become a little bit more prolific at whatever it is you'd like to do and if that's for you I'd really appreciate if you'd hit the Subscribe button that tells me you wouldn't mind seeing a few more videos all right back to it toxic sign number two your partner never lets you speak Evernote by its very nature is great at capturing words the problem is they're usually not your words they're the words of someone else out there on the internet and they felt important to you at one time but now now it feels like noise and worse it's blocking the really important thoughts of your own your Cherished Memories your ideas the noise is drowning out this signal now this is supposed to be a treasured space of yours a place to help you remember and make sense of the world but now now it's just a bunch of other people's words how do we get here well let's be kind to ourselves we didn't know better back then and we captured way too much so now if you feel like Evernote is painful to interact with is likely because your partner never lets you speak toxic sign number three your partner left the country how would you like to wake up one day and learn that your partner moved to Italy overnight and completely dished all of their old friends that's exactly what Evernote just did it was bought out by a company in Italy called bending spoons and half a year later they fired everyone so whoever you might have had trust with at Evernote they're no longer there whoever cared about honoring your privacy they're not there you are just another user with an estimated lifetime value being objectified in board meetings how can you trust Evernote when everyone everyone who ever worked at the company has been fired wow researching this piece actually riled me up way more than I was expecting so if you feel your relationship with Evernote has become toxic now let's explore the three things that you can look for in a new thinking partner three things to look for in a new thinking partner number one your partner is responsive alright so after being in obsidian it's really hard to use other apps because they're just so slow and get this while we're waiting for a web page to load our thoughts they're not waiting around they're gone if you want to work closer to the speed of thought and have your app catch up with your mind you'll want to consider using obsidian as your new thinking partner number two your partner can be trusted if I don't get using online apps for your personal notes I mean your most intimate information on someone else's server your private thoughts in someone else's hands I mean that's crazy now obsidian offers end-to-end encryption which means this you can have files on your phone communicate to files on your computer and everywhere in between it's encrypted no other Notes app keeps your information more private I mean how often do you see this in the App Store and the third thing to look for in a new thinking partner number three your partner isn't leaving the country most apps blind you with the shiny then in the darkness bind you before you know it you can't leave the app without some sort of serious digital surgery the good news is it's a lot easier now as I'll show you in just a second now with obsidian even if it vanishes tomorrow you would still have all your files readily available as files on your computer in a format that's easily readable and that's what we mean by being future proof okay so are you thinking about making the switch now let's look at how okay now for the moment of truth let's figure out how we can escape Evernote and hop into obsidian so how do you export from Evernote properly now the mistake is opening Evernote especially if you haven't downloaded it already in a long time and going from the most up-to-date release you'll actually get trapped it'll want you to provide a credit card it'll give you a seven day trial and after those seven days Evernote starts charging you I mean this is just a way to ruin the relationship even further now if you want to bypass that at least on Apple devices you can go to a place like mac update.com I believe and you can get Evernote version 7 and you won't need to input any credit card information you can just do the one thing that you need to do export your notes now how do we do that okay so I'm sharing my full screen for a reason just so you know in the background we have the actual script of today's video and we are now on how to switch so how do we export from obsidian we're going to be saving a DOT enex file where do we save it how do we export in the first place let's answer that so when you open up Evernote here and when you do you want to go to all notes and select a single note now while you're doing that then you'll hit command or control a and that's going to select all the notes here now you go all the way up to file on a Mac we're going to go to export notes now first thing you'll want to do is give it a name and you might say like you might just say all Evernote let's keep it simple all Evernote and you want to make sure to include tags for each note and you notice that it's a DOT enex file that's what you want and then the question is well where should it go so if you have the ace folder structure that's part of the idea of our system you go to atlas all vaults and for now I'm just going to put it into an example Vault but I would normally put it into my vaults all those different Knowledge Management systems that we might have had over the years so let's go example vaults and you can see I've already exported right here so I don't have to go ahead and hit save but if I did it would take about five minutes to package up all these notes okay so that's what you want to do go ahead and hit save and then we'll bounce out of that and we'll look into the next part now you have this new file first what do we do how do we import into obsidian so how to import the first thing that you're going to want to do do is go to community plugins and you want to browse for something called importer so here it is right here this is from the core obsidian team and we can go ahead and use this importer so now that it is already installed here it adds a button to the ribbon on the left so I can just hit this button and it's going to import data right now I confirm I want the Evernote file format then I'm going to look for the files to import and I want to put it in an output folder so where do I want to put these files so now if you're part of the ace folder structure you want to go Atlas Vault and then excuse me Atlas vaults and then Evernote so if I browse this file I go Atlas I'll find my vaults I'll find that example Vault and I'm going to click on my DOT enex file and go ahead and hit open so now it's loaded everything is ready to go I've already done this though so we're not going to waste any time now when you do hit import so I have about 3 100 notes and double that in total files so it will take I think it took around 10 minutes to do the import so just hold tight it will take some time but wow it's doing a lot of work so let's pretend we hit import Okay thousands of notes from Evernote have been imported successfully into my obsidian Vault but where do they exist so if you remember I put them in Atlas vaults and then made a new special Vault for all those Evernote notes all 6895 files so what we're going to do is we could just open this and see everything that that exists here but what I really want to do is open up the graph View and look specifically at this folder so let's open up the global graph and we can see that the path has already been set I have it going to Vault Evernote and we're getting all that information here so it's coming in as we speak now this is the time that I want to go into the ideaverse theme currently it's called the lyt mode and it will eventually be known as the ideaverse theme and why this theme is so important to look at is because it's beautiful and it's like a universe and it's Cosmic and it allows you to recognize whoa notes ideas we can fly around this information this knowledge we can have a lot of fun wandering now what you're looking at here all the yellow dots are notes all the purple dots are notes that have not been created now we can turn on tags and that's where things get really wild because I had a lot of Evernote tags now that looks like I had a healthy thinking environment in Evernote but the tags are misleading we can also turn on attachments all these gray nodes and now we can see how it's really expanding and we can also say existing files only that will get rid of the purple so let's turn off tags turn off attachments and we'll keep orphans on because what I want you to notice is that even though this was in Evernote I actually still made some links it was very painful to do that it was very painful to create these maps of content that I created over here I have a special project near and dear to my heart here but for the majority things are not connected and what is not connected is what is lost once you connect it you can relate it you can understand it you can work with it you can create with it so that's the beauty of this so this is my Evernote Vault now I showed you how I imported it into my personal ideaverse Vault now here's why you might not want to do that if I open up this sidebar and I look at the tags I will see all sorts of messy tags from Evernote all the tags are there because I asked during the export of Evernote to export the tags and I want those I want that information so would I recommend most everyone does is actually open up this Evernote vault as a separate Vault and here's how you do that so you go to atlas vaults Evernote right click and reveal in finder show in file explorer whatever operating system that you are on and you'll notice it's right here I can track it down the breadcrumbs and I want to now create a new Vault and point it at this folder so what I'm going to do is go back to obsidian and open another Vault now I want to open a folder as a vault so that's that middle Choice here and I'm going to find it if I recall correctly we're going to go Atlas all vaults example Vault and let's go example import I actually set this up ahead of time and we're going to import into evernote I have a few extra folders because I need to keep some things private but we're going to hit this magic button and now we have all those notes here and it's doing a quick index it's already done okay so we made the new Evernote fault into light mode ideaverse mode and now we can go into the graph and now we can see that graph we can actually see that it's quite Snappy and if we go to the tags over here we can see all those tags but now they won't be cluttering up this Vault and I can actually knowing where this is saved and knowing the Vault that I opened up was in a separate location I would feel comfortable deleting this I will do that eventually but I don't want to do that right now the point is you have your Evernote notes right here ready to go ready for you A lot of these are old a lot of them I have not looked at in a very long time okay so just to reiterate you have two options with where you store your old Evernote notes either as a subfolder in your main ideaverse or you can have it as a completely separate Vault and we looked at that here now if I were you I would likely do a completely separate Vault now quick side note if you're looking for guidance on how to set up your ideaverse your custom learning environment where you do your best thinking you can download this free ideaverse kit not with all my notes but with the basic folder scaffolding and all these starting connections to get you going it'll be in the description below amazingly this thing has been viewed over half a million times and it's been downloaded over seventy thousand times so this is the most trusted way to get started linking your thinking now as of this recording when you download it you'll see it as the lyt kit but in a month or so it will officially be the ideiverse kit Forever After and I hope it helps you have a healthier relationship with knowledge and if it does please let me know in the comments below and that brings us to the big point enjoy having a healthier relationship to knowledge you may find that obsidian in particular creates an environment where you actually do some of your best thinking see whereas Evernote encourages Information Management the hoarding and shuffling around of other people's words of obsidian encourages idea management the cultivation and development of your own mind and that includes synthesizing and sense making and helping you generate your value and your voice if Evernote has indeed become too toxic for you it's not too late to break up if you're feeling like a frog caught in a water pot boiling hot it's not too fraught to hop up to the top and switch off the shop you might just find that it's the beginning of a beautiful friendship okay so are you switching and if not what's holding you back or if you've already switched how's it going please let me know in the comments below and until next time stay connected hey if you love this video and you want to learn more about how our tools shape us yes our note-taking tools our note making tools you have to check out this video it is an epic analysis of four different Thinking Tools actually a few more and how they actually affect how we think so I hope to see you there

Channel: Linking Your Thinking with Nick Milo

Views: 115,474

Keywords: obsidian, linking your thinking, obsidian app, pkm

Id: 3Hm8P9kcOR0

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023