EVERNOTE: THE RIGHT APP FOR GTD (PART 2 Continued)
Evernote Search:
The Secret Weapon in
Organizing Evernote for GTD®
Published March 20, 2020
Last Updated December 8, 2023
by Stacey Harmon
WHAT WE KNOW:
Part 2 Intro: Where You Go Wrong Using Evernote for GTD® (Page 4 of 7)
Choosing Evernote as your GTD app is the right choice. Part 1 showed you why it’s the only app you need.
Your app choice is the foundation for building your trusted system.
It’s also essential to properly structure and maintain your app to experience GTD success. Many improperly use Evernote for GTD.
Evernote’s features better support a notebooks (vs tags) based approach to organizing Evernote GTD for many reasons. The first reason, search, is explained here.
EVERNOTE SEARCH
Evernote search is powerful. And really spectacular. When you understand how to use it, it’s a game-changer – to the point where it should influence how you organize Evernote.
Let’s look at an analogy to explain why.
Imagine yourself moving into a new house. First thing you do is pack up all the belongings you want to keep into cardboard boxes. Those boxes get loaded up onto the moving truck, and then carried into your new home.
But, your new home has a state-of-the art-techie tool. All entrances to the house are equipped with an invisible, magic force. This force tracks, logs, and indexes everything you bring into the home. You can’t lose anything you bring into the home because your house knows exactly what you brought in, and tracks its location at all times.
Because of this, whenever you want to find something – say the corkscrew – all you have to do is say “Hey house – where’s the corkscrew?” It doesn’t matter if it’s still in a box that is waiting in the dining room to be unpacked, is in the drawer on the right side of the kitchen sink, or is hiding out in the picnic basket in the trunk of your car in the garage. You just ask your house where it is and it will know.
But it doesn’t just tell you the location, it beams you right to that room (efficient, right?). And, if you have more than one corkscrew, your house will ask you which one you want, and then take you right there. It’s magic.
And this magic tracking and teleporting system works even if you move the wine opener from one room to another. It’s always current. More magic!
This is exactly how Evernote works. When you capture a piece of data to your account, it metaphorically crosses over the threshold of your Evernote house, and everything you capture gets scanned and indexed.
And, as covered in part 1 – you’ll capture everything in Evernote for GTD. It’s your second brain. So understanding how Evernote indexes everything so you can search for anything is important.
UNDERSTANDING EVERNOTE SEARCH
A lot happens when you capture a piece of content to Evernote. More than you think. And, when you understand what is happening behind the scenes, you can use that to your advantage to find what you seek.
For example, Evernote’s technology scans and tracks everything in both the title and the body of the note.
You likely expect that Evernote indexes the text it finds in the note and this is true whether you type directly into a note, forward an email into Evernote, or copy/paste text into the body of the note. Evernote logs and keeps track of it.
What you might not expect is that Evernote also tracks:
Any images you add to notes and any text that appears in those images.
Documents created outside of Evernote (for example: PDF’s, Word docs, Excel docs, Pages docs, etc.) and the interior contents of those documents.
This means that if you add a PDF to Evernote – all the words inside that PDF are tracked by Evernote and subject to search retrieval.
This means those photos you put in Evernote (images of the wine label from your friend’s dinner party, your passport, the concert ticket from 1995, your kid’s artwork) – all the words in the image are tracked by Evernote.
Which means you can ask Evernote to find phrases and words that appear in those pictures (OCR indexing is the technical term).
And, yes – Evernote can search and retrieve handwriting. So take a photo of those notes you scribbled down when a lead came in over the phone, the notes from the conference you just attended, the whiteboard from your teams brainstorming session, and the sticky note on your computer monitor. Capture it all to Evernote, so Evernote can work its magic.
And there’s more.
Evernote’s magic force also tracts invisible note details (metadata) about the content you capture including:
When it was created
How it was created (was it a picture, an email, a business card scan, a post-it note, a website, a document, an audio capture, etc.)
The location it was created (if you have location services authorized on your device)
What notebook the note is in (remember, it has to live in a notebook)
What tags – if any – are assigned to the note
Checkbox status: Evernote knows if the note contains a checkbox list and if those checkboxes are complete or incomplete.
And you can ask Evernote to find anything you capture in Evernote using any of these data points – either on their own, or in compound combination.
Basically – everything you put into Evernote gets indexed and tracked so that you can find it.
It’s like the whole entire note is a tag.
With an understanding of how search works, it becomes clear that the entire note is basically a massive group of tags. EVERYTHING that is in that note is scanned and indexed by Evernote, and any of it can be used to retrieve what you seek.
If you’re inclined to organize your Evernote account using a tag-based approach (meaning, you’re adding tags to your notes during the GTD processing phase so you can find those notes through a tag search at some point in the future), let me ask you this:
What are the chances that what you’re tagging your note with already appears somewhere (anywhere) in the note? For example, the client or vendor name or a reference to the type of project (website, taxes, presentation, home). I’m betting that the answer for most of the notes you process is this: it’s already there.
So why add it again? It’s extra work you don’t need to do.
And, who wants to do more work than they need to? Certainly not me.
The fact that the whole note is a tag that can be used to retrieve what you seek via Evernote search is the #1 reason that I advocate use of a notebook based approach to organizing Evernote for GTD. The simple fact is it’s less work.
And, it’s just one reason. To understand the others, join me on the next page.
Trademark Notice: Neither Stacey Harmon nor Harmon Enterprises, is licensed, certified, approved, or endorsed by or otherwise affiliated with David Allen or the David Allen Company which is the creator of the Getting Things Done® system for personal productivity. GTD® and Getting Things Done® are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company. For more information on the David Allen Company's products, please visit their website: www.davidco.com.