Category: Productivity

My Analog Digital Adventure

- Wendy 1 Comment

Earlier this week, I went in search of a new notebook to carry with me, to jot down notes during meetings and whatnot. Why? Well, for years, I used a Franklin Planner, but I gradually moved away from that, as I spent more and more time on a computer. Now, I have my laptop with me most of the time, and my smartphone handy always, so it seemed that going digital would be the way to go, in terms of daily planning and note-taking. It’s a bit awkward to pull out my cell phone during a meeting, but I just assume everyone knows I’m taking notes, and not sending random texts. It was a system, but it wasn’t really working as well as it could. More often than not, I find myself grabbing whatever is handy for jotting down notes when I’m in a meeting, or chatting with students. Blank paper, post-it notes, restaurant napkins – whatever is nearby, I’ll grab it. Sure, my phone and computer are nearby, but it’s just less disruptive to write things down on paper.

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Evernote Organization

- Wendy Leave a comment

A while back, I wrote about my ongoing process to organize ALL THE THINGS in Evernote (Tag Wrangling in Evernote, Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote, Storage Space in Evernote, and Evernote). After doing the big tag reorganization last summer, I feel like I’ve come to a pretty comfortable place, so it seems like a good time to update about the structure of my current system.

The nutshell version: moving to a small number of notebooks, and relying on tags and Evernote’s “Search” function is working out really well!

Now, let’s walk through my system in more detail, and how it’s evolved since last summer.

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Tag Wrangling in Evernote

- Wendy 1 Comment

I’ve written about Evernote before (Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote, Storage Space in Evernote, and Evernote), and it’s time for an update. I’d been feeling as though my organizational system wasn’t quite working as efficiently as I want it to – I can’t always find things easily when I want them – so I went looking to see how other people are using the program. After being inspired by some Evernote gurus (particularly Michael Hyatt and Thomas Honeyman), I decided to make a HUGE leap, away from notebooks, and to using tags as my primary tool for organizing my notes. With more than 16,000 notes in my system, it’s somewhat daunting to think about making this change, but I’m going to take the plunge anyway.

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Evernote

- Wendy St. John 1 Comment

One of the things I struggle with periodically (or perhaps I should say I “refine” periodically) is my organizational strategy for keeping track of things on my computer, particularly teaching materials. I’ve been using Evernote for several years (I adopted the system in November, 2010, and have been using it consistently ever since), and as soon as I started teaching, I set up a system for those materials. I thought I’d share a little bit about the ways it’s working for me, and not working.

Here’s an overview of the system:

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 9.01.31 PM
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Storage Space in Evernote

- Wendy St. John 1 Comment

I remember reading something about you using Evernote, and I was wondering if you ever run out of space to store things? I was thinking about getting into using it. ~ Anonymous

Hi! The short answer is, no – you don’t ever run out of storage space over the long run, but the long answer is slightly more complicated.

The way Evernote handles the issue of space is that you get a certain amount of upload capability per month. With a free account, it’s 60 MB per month, which is a lot of text notes, but if you start uploading images or pdfs, you can use that up pretty quickly. For a paid account ($5 a month), you get 1GB of storage per month, which is, well, rather a lot. Then, at the end of the month, your storage limits reset, so you get another 60 MB or 1 GB of data. If you are just getting started, and want to get a bunch of data uploaded, you could always pay for an account just for a month or two, to get all your things onto their server*, and then continue on with a free account. Because, once you have uploaded something to the server, it’s there until you delete it, and you have unlimited storage space from that perspective. In other words, you’re limited to the amount you can upload in a single month, but ultimately, the storage is unlimited.

I don’t know exactly how much storage space I am using (several GBs; I have a lot of things scanned documents saved as pdfs, so I can throw away the paper copies), but I have about 17,000 individual notes in Evernote, and it works fine. Sometimes, with that many notes, the search function is a little slow, but it’s still WAY faster than if I had to try and find things by navigating through folders as I did before Evernote.

Hopefully this answers your question. 🙂 I genuinely love Evernote and use it every single day, so I would highly recommend it.

*A free way to get around the single month upload limit is that you can put an unlimited number of notes into “local” folders – ones that are not sync’d to Evernote’s servers. It only uses upload space when you put things in a “synchronized” notebook. For me, a big part of Evernote is having the cloud back up so I basically sync everything, but while you’re getting started, if you want to avoid having to pay for an account, you could put notes in a local folder, get them all tagged and organized the way you want them, and then just transfer them slowly, over time, into synchronized notebooks as you get more storage space each month.

Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

This is my system for archiving and organizing all my Tumblr posts offline. (It could also be used for Facebook, or LJ or any other site that allows you to pull an RSS feed).

Evernote is organizational software I’ve been using for several years, and I love it with the fiery passion of 10,000 suns. It keeps pretty much my entire life organized, with the exception of my calendar. It’s a program for storing documents and files of just about any type, and it allows you to organize them into notebooks (of your designation), and to tag them any way you like. Many types of documents are also text searchable. It is phenomenal. Really. (There are also some other amazing features, like a web clipper that is possibly the best thing on the whole planet, and it’s word processor is good enough that I do all my fiction writing in Evernote, as it’s really easy to organize chapters).

In order to get archive/backup/offline copies of all your future Tumblr posts, first you’ll need to find your Evernote email address. You should be able to find it under “Account Summary,” and it will end in “evernote.com.”

Next, go to Blogtrottr.com, and create a free account there USING THIS EVERNOTE ADDRESS. That part is important. 😀 (Unless you want to bypass Evernote, and just send your posts to your email account. If you have a fab system for organizing emails, this might work, and you wouldn’t need Evernote. But Evernote is wonderful and you want it anyway, so pretend I never said this about emails :D).

Now, in Blogtrottr, just subscribe to the RSS feed.

That’s really all there is to it! Now, all posts that you make will be sent directly into Evernote, where they will be kept on the Evernote servers, and also synced to your harddrive (you can control how often this happens; I have mine set to sync every 15 minutes). Once they’re in Evernote (I have them all dumped into a folder called “Inbox”), you can go in and tag them and organize them to your heart’s content. And edit them. And all hyperlinks and images will be included. (Although sadly, tags are NOT).

Now, like I said, this is only going to work from posts for here on out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some way to pull all your Tumblr posts relatively easily. Tumblr doesn’t have an export feature, to my knowledge, but something like Tumblr2WordPress might be useful? Especially if maybe you actually imported them into a new WP blog that was set up to send posts to Evernote. (You can set up multiple feeds in Blogtrottr).

So, hopefully this helps, and let me know if you have any questions. 🙂

ETA: A couple of things to add – you’ll want to select “Realtime Push” rather than any of the digest settings, so the posts come individually. Also, under email preferences, I have them: “Enabled,” “Show Thumbnails in emails” and “List media files (enclosures) in emails.” And Mail format is: Multipart text/html.