I was listening to the podcast of the ever amusing battle between Patrick and Brett on Yojimbo vs Evernote. I am only a recent Evernote convert. Before I walked over to the “green side”, I was (still am) a text nerd, using Simplenote and Taskpaper as my main information capturing tool. I figured that if I can’t distill information down to words, it is still not useful to me yet. Some thought process must need to go through before it becomes useful, and the outcome of that thought process must be words. A picture speaks a thousand words. That is just too many words for me. Three sentences would suffice.

Little did I know that I was trying to make Evernote an Everynote, which no software will ever be. I think Eddie says it best here.

Don’t approach Evernote with an all or nothing attitude. Instead, 1) look for specific ways that Evernote can make your life easier, 2) use it for those things, and 3) STOP.

If you haven’t tried Evernote, give it a try. It’s free. I use it to mainly deal with pieces of paper that are shoved to me (think pamphlets and business cards) and I don’t know how to politely refuse. Now I just take a picture of it and dump it into Evernote.

I also “force” other people to use Evernote, unconsciously. When I need a certain document from Jane say, I just ask her to send to myemail+note@gmail.com. This way, my gmail filter system will grab this email and auto-forward it to Evernote and delete it from my email account. It’s like magic.

p/s: “Enough” is one of the very few podcasts I listen to regularly. Subscribe to them if you haven’t already.