Managing information in your personal and professional life

While all of us suffer from an information overload, how we deal with that information is often what separates us on a professional level. This blog entry is a review of my experiences managing this information, leading up to Evernote, a product that works well in practice.

Here at work we are slowly implementing a records management policy, and a probable outcome is that we will be unable to keep email older than one year. As an IT professional this has implications, because my email is full of useful information that I want to keep. After discussing this at length with our records manager, I came to the conclusion that I really need some sort of "personal information manager". In about March 2009 I discovered Evernote, an online service.

But first a little history, and for that we can go back a long way to software products like Lotus Agenda and others whose names I have forgotten . One of them lost all my personal information when the computer crashed, and I never did find out who had borrowed some things of mine. But none of those products really worked well enough to "stick".
The internet has become a huge source of this information, and managing browser bookmarks has always been a problem for me. From about 2000 I used a Lotus Notes database to track my bookmarks and other information, and it worked very well. One really nice feature was the ability to add notes to each bookmark to explain why you bookmarked it. Another useful feature was replicating the database between systems so that I really had just one bookmark list to manage, even on different systems. However, there were several problems with the Notes database; possibly the biggest was that getting anything in the database involved a multi step cut and past operation. This is where Evernote really shines because (in Firefox) you can use a button that automatically puts the bookmark in your database with just one click. If you want the content of the page, there is just one box to check and you have saved it for future searching. Another really nice feature of Evernote is that I don't have to maintain any code, nor even a server. In fact I can get to my Evernote database from any browser. Evernote also features a stand alone client so in the event of them disappearing at least I can still have my information.

Evernot really shines when it comes to adding keyword tags to notes. Just like Taglocity, keyword tags actually work much better than folders because you can search on multiple keywords. Its difficult to search a Notes database and find the documents in multiple folders, but Evernote easily lets you find all the notes with a particular keyword tag. It also maintains a full text index so you can search for multiple keyword tags and even inside attached files. Another nice feature is that you can mail into your Evernote account, so if you get that technical information in your work email that you want to keep, you just forward it to your Evernote account. That gets around the limitation of having your work email deleted after a year.

All of this is not to say that it is perfect. For example, the rich text is limited - you can't paste in pictures. This is a strange limitation because you can import pdf files, and you seem to get everything - probably the case of the product not being fully developed yet. Another limitation is printing, where even though you set the font to one size on the note, when you print it out, the font is much bigger. There are feature missing: the ability to warn me when adding a duplicate bookmark. and a tool to find duplicate bookmarks. But these are minor limitations that should be resolved as the product matures.

I have been using Evernote for about 9 months now and currently have over 1400 items in my database. I really love how easy it is to clip web pages and add notes, and the fact that I can seamlessly integrate it into my personal and profession information management needs. Evernote allows all that technical information to follow be wherever I go. The searching works well, and you can add keyword tags to all Notes. There is a free version of Evernote, and a paid version at $5 per month. The paid version allows you to add any files to a note, and allows you to search inside those files. In all, Evernote has proved to be a very practical way to manage all that person and professional information that I collect very well - highly recommended.