How to use EVERNOTE for Getting Things Done (GTD)

hey what's up everybody it's lucas here and in this video we're going to take a look at evernote to see how well we can use it in 2022 excited to try out its task management functionality see how it's evolved because i've been an evernote user for many years actually and the very first video on this channel was about evernote 2. unfortunately back then it was for a not so positive reason i wanted to move away from evernote i used the desktop and mobile apps to great satisfaction for a long time especially because they were so fast so quick to use unfortunately that advantage completely disappeared with some of its forced updates whether it's on web whether it's the desktop app or the mobile app it just became super sluggish that's why i moved away from it and i guess the silver lining is it motivated me to try out other tools and eventually record my journey and start this youtube channel so it kind of comes full circle here let's return to evernote see how it's evolved in 2022 and how well you can use it as a task manager especially if you follow the getting things done methodology so let's dive right in for the sake of this tutorial we're going to pretend to be cody cat lover and if you didn't guess it yet cody's very much into cats that's a recurring theme that we'll be seeing throughout this tutorial if you have any widgets in your home screen here i suggest just remove those we're gonna start from scratch here with a clean slate and i want to take you to the settings here first of all you can set up some more simple preferences such as the theme dark or light that's always good to have i prefer dark mode but i feel like light mode is a bit easier to see in a video so that's why i'm gonna switch back here and then let's move to account info to just make sure every setting is the way it should be under personal settings you can set up your name display language as well as some miscellaneous settings about email notifications which i usually turn off this is one i'm interested in the web clients and it asked me to enable version 10 plus web clients performance for large accounts may be slow interesting as this is the exact reason i left evernote behind more than a year ago now it just started getting slow and yes i had a large account although i had under 1 000 notes so it wasn't even that large and i still noticed it was just unbearably slow unusable really so the fact that it's showing up here gives me a bit of pause for this tutorial we're not going to be expanding our account into a large one but if you find yourself waiting for the app to load this may be a setting to help you with that or after all still go back to evernote legacy i'm skipping some of the more sensitive settings here but under reminders you can get a daily digest of your upcoming reminders i like to turn that on because my system is filled with reminders i set up for myself context sources not to be confused with anything related to gtd contexts it feels like they just have this collaboration with a couple of these companies and publishers so it shows up when you google stuff for example they give you suggested content it's trash i think it's trash just disable it all you can also connect a couple of services the most useful for most folks probably being apple and google especially the calendar and the drive integration so you can directly add google drive files into your notes this is something they've had for a while even in evernote legacy this is supported and it's a great feature so i recommend you turn it on if you do use google drive for capturing you'll want to make sure you have an inbox inside of evernote this has to be a notebook in fact it should be the default notebook when you've started your account you will have one of those it's the notebook where everything ends up initially unless you change it during capturing so it's a great use for it really and you can rename it you can press the three dots here to rename your notebook add it to shortcuts which i believe i haven't done yet so that's something we can also do here just for more easy access if we need it and then when we select new we can add a new note or task but in this tutorial we're going to be mostly focusing on notes i'll explain why later on we can give it a title here and you'll see that by default the notebook it ends up in is inbox and the same is true for the mobile experience so with the app there is a great widget that i really recommend you put on your home screen because it allows you to add a new item with just the press of a button and you can see that item here now so it synchronizes way quickly too now let's look at one of evernote's most exciting features for capturing which is their web clippers so here i'm on my website i've got an article that's pretty long it has some design elements to it as well so saving this somewhere would be difficult with many apps but not with evernote once you've downloaded the chrome or other browser extension you can press it and it says loading web clipper because that's what this is it can clip or in other words cut and paste into your system any type of content on the web and you can see you can have different formats so if i select full page it includes the design however and what i like to do is selecting simplified article will remove many of these elements but retain what's important for you to properly read its paragraphs headings etc this is really good you can also select the notebook for it to end up in obviously that's going to have to be the inbox we want to remove any tagging for now because this is just an empty item for clipping purposes in fact we can make that a bit easier on ourselves in the future when we press settings here we're taken to a menu there what we want to do is instead of use smart filing select use inbox so what this means is by default anything you clip will be sent here and that's what we want and the same goes for tag selection you can either use quote unquote smart filing but that's not smart enough for us or we can add a default tag but i don't see the point of that so just leave both of these empty and it will have no tags by default the rest we can skip for now but you can see that it's a pretty extensive setting menu for something as simple as a chrome extension which tells you they've really put thought into this it's really one of the best ways to save items from the web now we're saving it it's syncing we have to wait and there we go it's saved and now you can see in the inbox we have the article including the title including the link to the source including all the images the text and because we use that simplified view we can have a very easy reading experience when we read it either here or perhaps on our phone or tablet in addition you can also use the mobile apps sharing functionality to capture something directly into the inbox from mobile devices you can even email items into your inbox for that you just can go back to your settings go to account summary here and scroll all the way down you'll see a setting named email notes 2 and it will have an email handle given to you by evernote as it says here you can email notes snapshots and other clips directly into your account emailed notes will go directly into your default notebook which if you follow the tutorial you'll find that to be your inbox so that's perfect it means you have all these different ways to capture very thoroughly before we dive into processing these items let's first have a look at how we've structured evernote what kind of notebooks in other words list do we have labels perhaps to organize our system here notebooks are the main taxonomy where everything lives inside of basically it's still a note taker and we're just trying to hack it to become more like a task manager so there will be some reinterpretation going on here as well we already looked at the inbox which is the default list and you can see that i've numbered them as well the reason is that by default and i didn't find a way to reorder them they are ordered on alphabetical order so if you want the inbox to naturally show up above and perhaps also sort by horizon of focus if you're a gt dear this is the way to do it just make sure to number them and that will decide their placement you can also stack notebooks that's what i've done here you can see i've stacked them into my tasks and projects and below there you will see specific project lists such as this one remember kodi cat lover so of course one of his projects is to hold a cat meetup and it's a defined outcome but it has multiple steps what we did here was to capture an article just like we did before here about how to organize a meetup so that's the next action that lives inside of that project list and how we process that we'll look at in just a moment another one is standalone items so outcomes that can be achieved on their own can live here there's a not now list in fact it's a stacked list under that you can bundle various types of items that you may want to do later here a common example is trips travels you want to make in the future anything you can think of in any way you want to categorize it i recommend doing it in this way if you want to bundle lists under these main categories as seen here what you can do is first create a notebook and from there for example here i have the reference material list which i've called the personal wiki if i were to categorize that you can press the three buttons here and then select add to stack and you can create a new one or select an existing one so that's how i've done this the last example of that is the higher horizon listing my responsibilities is something i can do here my smart goals i can define them here my vision and my purpose that's where those notes can live now let's see how we can make sense of items that end up into our inbox as you can see we have three items sitting here it's a quick note we've made on mobile another one here and an item that we've captured so how does that work inside of evernote that's where we'll actually have a look at tags and you can see that you can also stack these tags in various ways which is great so what i've done here is add a couple of tag categories the first being contacts this is something we can use for agenda items if we have an individual that we need to speak to something about ask question or if we have a meeting that's coming up we'll want to have a list available to inform us exactly what are the talking points within that setting so that's where you can apply these tags to you can name it anything in this case cody cat lover has a friend named freddie feline and when we press it we can see that we're actually waiting for freddy for an rsvp an rsvp for what well that's the cat meetup so it's all nicely interlinked here and you can see i applied multiple tags because the other one waiting for is also a common gtd tag you can apply and that's what i've done by applying it at the bottom here so when you've got a notes you can add a tag by either clicking here or typing here these are examples of normal tags they have their own name and it's pretty clear what it stands for and you could argue that's the case for all of them we also have a context tag which is important for actionable items what you can see here though is i've applied these symbols in front of them and that's because you will likely have many of these it's difficult to quickly find them if you just type them by their name perhaps you have a home context tag but perhaps you also have a home reference tag and you don't want to confuse those that's why i always label reference items with a dash and these with a double colon and that way it's easier to quickly find them the same was for time estimated it has a less than symbol and it actually makes sense because it should take 10 minutes or less 30 minutes or less etc that's our estimate so let's imagine if we go back to the inbox here that this is an actionable item it's an article we've clipped and we want to read it we've already done all the work when it comes to the makeup because that's what the clippers done it has all the contents available for us including the title here we can add the text let's press plus and first of all add the next action text we can just type to add and right there it already shows it it's a next action now let's add the context and again we just start with the symbol and that way every context we've defined in our system is easily retrievable this is something we want to read so we add the read context it's pretty long and it has a few videos so let's assume that this takes us about 30 minutes to actually complete so we add this symbol and there we have every time we've predefined in our system available as well now the last thing we'll want to do is actually move it out of the inbox we can select it from there and press move note and here we can select an actionable list standalone items let's put it there for now what you can also do if you want to have a more elaborate system is group these notebooks by their area of focus perhaps you have a personal growth area of focus that's something where this could end up in but that's up to you then you can move it in there and now we have one item less and we're on our way to clearing out the inbox you can imagine how easy this is at scale you can do this very easily every single day once you filled up your inbox to add the tags move the notes into their appropriate place if you want to quickly and easily find next actions with a certain context you can do so by combining these tags and turning them into a shortcut and that's what i've done here an example here is a combined filter that has both the next tag as well as the home tag and you can even rename it the way to do that is by searching for it and then saving that search so let's do the same thing here but instead create a reading list now i found it to be a bit weird in terms of how to set this up you actually have to search for something and then you have to add the filters after that and it seems to actually remove the original syntax of what you searched for so you have to kind of get used to that but for now let's just add the filters then selecting the following tags next and context is read and that's actually it so now we have this list we can save the search here and from there we can rename it so we can do my reading list and importantly you want to make sure to add it to shortcuts and now you can see when i navigate to my reading list it automatically has these tags associated with them so i don't even have to think about finding these reading items anymore in future all i have to do is process them when they end up in my inbox knowing that once i've done it correctly it will just end up here so now i actually have two different projects that these items are related to the first is about the cat meetup that i want to organize so i've saved an article from meetup.com explaining to me how does it actually work what do i need to take into account and the other one is a todoist tutorial so a completely different project you can also see it here and you can actually see it in various different ways too if you want to for example change the view you can do that here and you can select the card view you can select the snippet view we just saw we can select the site list or the top list and if you select that one you'll have the most information available to you before clicking the item itself location means which notebook is it a part of so you can translate this to the related projects it's a really great flexible system that allows you to view information in the way you prefer now i wouldn't prefer this actually i like things to be vertically divided so i sacrifice that extra piece of information for the view that i prefer you can also expand the note for an even better reading experience once you're ready to engage as you already introduced in an earlier part of the video for reference i have a separate notebook here i called it the personal wiki obviously you can name it anything you want and so far it just has one article it's an article about cats how intelligent are they and obviously cody would really like that and perhaps he would like to share it with his friend peter lover in the future how can you easily save that in your system that's where these reference tags come into play that i've already shown and you can add them just as you would with an actionable item the reason i don't like to categorize these by lists which you could do you could create a stack just like with the bucket list items here is that many reference items may have multiple tags associated with them for example this one is organized both by their type of reference item in this case is an article as well as the subject it's about and that wouldn't be as easy to do if we had the list only approach let's turn this into practice and assume that we have read this article that we just clipped what we need to do to move it out of the actionable list is first of all change the tags let's do that now and just press backspace to remove them now we can type to add so as you remember for reference we start with the dash and you can either select what already exists and in this case we can we can select article but we also want to group it by subject so that's where we can for example type self development and then click it to create and perhaps even another one let's select gtd so you can create as many of these as you want and lastly you just want to make sure to move it to the reference notebook so that it's all nice and clean and there you go we marked a reading item complete so to speak and move it into the reference file if you don't want to move it anywhere after reading it you can just delete the note of course that way it's out of your system okay now let's address the elephant in the room here what about evernote tasks this is something they introduced to evernote last year and you may be surprised that i'm only talking about it now well it's a bit underwhelming so i really tried my best to make that work i was actually excited to see that evernote added this functionality if we can mark tasks complete and archive them instead of deleting the notes that's a big step up so the first way i tried doing this is by creating a task from this menu here so you can create the task you can give it a title but right there you can see it must be assigned to a note and that's where it first gave me pause so these aren't standalone items on equal footing with the notes instead they have to live inside of a note that's why i started thinking well that kind of defeats the purpose of it i want to have that separation not for it to become part of it so that's one thing and you can see the result of that here the note has the exact same title as the task i can mark the task complete and it does show here in the search results or in the list view so that's not bad but once i mark it complete it still lives in there the problem isn't solved i would still need to delete the notes for it to actually be removed from my actionable view and it gets worse because at least you would think well there should be an easy way to find these tasks so let me show you what happens let's say i want to search for a task and again i can just type something here but then remove filters and it kind of resets then i select the filter you can select contains and it has all these different types of elements into it now again to evernote's credit it's very rich in its note-taking functionality so you can filter very extensively but one thing i would want to be able to filter for is items that have tasks that would perhaps make the next tag redundant if i can through this filter separate tasks from reference material for example however i selected no results why i have tasks they're right here but when i search for it there's no results it's not really effective for gtd purposes i don't see myself using it if it was a separate entity perhaps i would but i recommend you to actually not use these tasks and instead just reinterpret notes as tasks through the tagging functionality so that concludes the evernote tutorial here and i have mixed feelings although i'm a bit relieved to see that it's become fast to use the big caveat there though is it was a very small demo account so let me know in the comments how fast is evernote for you if you're a heavy user if you have hundreds or even thousands of notes in there i'm curious to hear from your experiences overall though through its diverse notebook functionality and stacked notebooks tags filters safe searches you can get very far and use it perfectly well as a t3d system so i would definitely give it my stamp of approval for that use case let me know in the comments what you think and then i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Lucas Prigge

Views: 36,938

Keywords: evernote, getting things done evernote, gtd evernote, evernote gtd, evernote getting things done, evernote setup, evernote tasks, evernote legacy, evernote 2022, how to use evernote, evernote tutorial, evernote guide

Id: bsDSA3-oYUA

Length: 24min 28sec (1468 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 23 2022