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I started off several years ago with stacks and notebooks and a few tags. And I didn't dislike Evernote, but I could take it or leave it. Couldn't get up the energy to hate it.
Then I caught onto the idea of having 100,000 tags instead of 250 notebooks, and went the whole hog and tagged everything in sight, deleting notebooks once they were empty. And now I loathe Evernote (and I'm not that keen on OneNote, either, before you start). But others are raving about it, especially genealogists. I am a real clutterbug at home; I keep EVERYTHING, including old bus tickets, out-of-date magazines, the lot. So why would I hate something which saves everything you want it to and makes snipping from the web...well...a snip?
Maybe it's because it's so organised. At home, those old bus tickets can float around and land wherever they want. Evernote tags 'em, files 'em, makes 'em searchable, and BAM! there's no such thing as clutter any more. Maybe that's what it is. It's giving me an inferiority complex.
If you like Evernote - fine. If it's the most perfect solution in the world to your life's problems - fine. If you simply couldn't live without it, and don't know what you did before you found it - fine.
So what's wrong with me? Why don't I feel the same way?
© 2015 Ros Haywood. All Rights Reserved
Well Ros, I cannot explain your dislike, but it made me smile. I absolutely love Evernote. Why? Because I am a very organized person and it allows me to be even more organized. I cannot be too organized. It's how I function.
ReplyDeleteThanks for making me smile.
Glad it made you smile! Actually, I smiled too once I had written it. It was as if I needed to get out all that pent-up frustration which seemed so wrong when everybody else was raving about it. I felt like I must be doing something wrong if I didn't LOVE Evernote. It's actually taken me quite a while to realise I can run it how I want to. If I want notebooks instead of tags - fine. Nobody will look down on me if I use Evernote in a slightly different way.
DeleteI found your site because I googled "I hate Evernote". I'm looking for a place to grip with fellow Evernote users about the longstanding bugs that they never seem to fix!
ReplyDeleteAs to your question - well, there is a certain comfort factor to the sort of clutter you describe. If it works for you, great! I used to think it was working for me, then I turned 30 or so and realized: it only worked for me because of all the youthful energy I was able to put into it (pulling all nighters to find an important document, etc.) and because I had relatively few responsibilities. Still, I was able to console myself that it was probably the best I could do, and became resigned to live with it. Then, I went to a lecture by David Allen who created GTD (Getting Things Done, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done ) and found a way of organizing things that made intuitive sense to me. His lectures also helped me understand how much unacknowledged stress my ad hoc, cluttered habits were causing me. David Allen was very progressive with it came to using computers to organize. Once phones became smart, I poured over his notes and his online forums and decided that Evernote was the best app for GTD. And it has made a huge difference. It is only a slight exaggeration to day, without GTD and Evernote, I might well be dead by now...Your Mileage May Vary.
And yet...Evernote has these obvious bugs (document editor corrupts documents sometimes, database looses stuff -- it turns out, elephants DO forget, offline search is broken, etc.) that have been there for over a year with no sign of a fix, and seemingly, no official acknowledgement of a problem. And yet I've become dependent enough on it that I can't justify changing to a different app. That's why I love, and hate, Evernote.
Well, that's my story. Thanks for your blog.