More on the usefulness, “dangers” and “complexity” of Evernote

Once again I’m sur­prised (and pleased) by how useful Evernote, the tool for stor­ing infor­ma­tion, is, so I decided to share a few thoughts and quotes about it.

First, as an addi­tion to my note about complicated tools:

Every time I end up talk­ing to yet another person dis­ap­pointed with what Evernote can do, I notice the same reasons. Most often, people simply rarely turn to the tool.

Armen Petrosyan: “Evernote helps us build and live”

[Armen goes on to say that such people treat Evernote as a notepad clut­tered with baf­fling extras, or dump every­thing unsorted into one or two note­books, and change their minds once you show them note­books, tags and saved searches.]

Since I’m slowly col­lect­ing all sorts of ref­er­ence mate­r­ial in my Evernote note­book, a comment by Sergey Sukhov caught my interest:

At some point I con­cluded that Evernote is only con­ve­nient for stor­ing ref­er­ence infor­ma­tion, and only infor­ma­tion you don’t need very often at that. But it quickly turned out that in prac­tice “not very often” means “almost never”.

and later in the discussion:

One of them [the rea­sons] is how cat­a­stroph­i­cally fast infor­ma­tion goes out of date.

[Sergey adds that a whole col­lec­tion can become use­less within a couple of weeks, and that he has given up Evernote completely.]

Now I wonder: isn’t it the pas­sion for col­lect­ing that pushes me, like many others, to stock­pile things I most likely don’t need? Maybe here, too, you have to be care­ful not to clut­ter your living space?

On the other hand, you can use this tech­nol­ogy pre­cisely to clear out clut­ter. For exam­ple, instead of keep­ing the orig­i­nals of paper busi­ness cards, flyers, price lists, hand­writ­ten notes and dia­grams, you can keep elec­tronic copies. A phone camera shot works for any­thing that isn’t an offi­cial doc­u­ment, and is even good enough to print if needed.

So, at the moment I use Evernote for:

• dig­i­tiz­ing all sorts of papers;
• making audio notes when it’s awk­ward to type ideas or to-dos (on the go in the street, say);
• online bookmarks.

About bookmarks. After the Chrome exten­sion for the online book­mark­ing ser­vice Delicious stopped work­ing for me, I started using Evernote to store bookmarks. It’s handy that you can copy part of a page, if it’s big and the impor­tant infor­ma­tion is in one place, or the whole page, if you’re afraid it’ll change its URL and get lost.

In the com­ments to that same arti­cle, Igor Kalmykov makes his case for the service:

Evernote is an excep­tion­ally handy thing; I got “hooked” on it almost as soon as I learned about the service. I think what makes it unique is not just sync­ing data across all your devices, which is very con­ve­nient in itself, but also a few extremely useful “tricks”:

[Igor lists three: hier­ar­chi­cal tags, which let him keep every­thing in a single note­book; the Win + A short­cut, which clips any­thing from any appli­ca­tion into Evernote; and a spe­cial email address you can copy let­ters to, which files them with tags or into a notebook. He finds what­ever he needs almost instantly, and ends by thank­ing Stepan Pachikov, who founded Evernote, for his creation.]

To sum up: I join in the thanks to the ser­vice’s devel­op­ers and rec­om­mend it.

P.S. If you don’t know the tool, run to Ostrozub’s blog for help: “What is Evernote” (with pictures).

P.P.S. By the way, check out the teaser video in the side­bar of Sergey Sukhov’s blog. A great find, IMHO.