There’s a lot to evaluate when choosing your GTD app. And it’s rooted in this core lesson from Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity:
I am just getting started with GTD and loving it, and Evernote has been a huge help. Totally free and very similar to OneNote. The best part is being able to take a text note, snapshot, audio note, at any time from my phone and it will automatically sync to the web and my pc. Have not been able to find that kind of mobile support with. I’ve stated that your GTD practice is suffering because you’re organizing your Evernote account using tags. And, I’ve shown that when you understanding the impact of Evernote search on your data management experience, you have reason enough to embrace a notebooks-based approach for GTD. But there’s also lots to learn about effectively practicing GTD in Evernote when you understand the.
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
So, where should you put your ideas and things to remember if not in your brain? As David Allen convincingly teaches:
YOU MUST HAVE A TRUSTED SYSTEM OUTSIDE YOUR BRAIN
This central GTD theme means:
Trusted: If you don’t trust your system, it falls apart. Do you have a system you trust 100% to capture, retain, process, and retrieve everything you want to remember and tackle every day, over the course of your life?
System: The system is the framework by which you route and manage all the “stuff” that comes at you. David’s book teaches the heuristics and methodology for managing your own GTD system. Even as technology evolves, the GTD system rules remain the same.
Outside your brain: Our brain is forgetful. Our brain gets overwhelmed. Our brain ages. Your trusted system cannot be your brain.
Picking an app that makes this theme your reality is essential.
And, although the book teaches the methodology for creating and managing your trusted system, the GTD methodology is deliberately software neutral.
Each reader is left to develop their own system to hold ideas outside their brain. This means that to succeed with GTD, you must pick an app – or a suite of apps – to create your trusted system.
REASON #2: EVERNOTE’S FLEXIBLE
GTD is a comprehensive life management system. And since your life is unique from everyone else’s, a one-size-fits all solution for your trusted system doesn’t exist.
Pick a tool that has flexibility so it can support your unique life needs.
Evernote is a flexible platform in several key ways.
First, Evernote works on all major operating systems.
This is a major consideration that many underestimate the long term impact of.
Choosing a GTD software app that works only on specific platforms is risky. It can lock you into future hardware choices, or worse, force you to switch GTD apps if your hardware evolves over time.
Instead, set yourself up for long term success by picking an app (Evernote) that’s hardware agnostic.
Think this isn’t an issue for you? Reflect back over the past 20 years. How many times have you switched technology platforms (you were sure that BlackBerry would be around forever, right)?
Even if you firmly believe you are in (for example) the Mac camp. Can you say for sure you will be in 8 years from now? What if you take a job and they require you to use a top of the line Window’s machine at work? Are you ok with not being able to access your GTD productivity system while at your new job?
Or maybe you think your Samsung Galaxy is the bee’s knees and has the best camera in existence. Can you really say for sure that it will always be this way?
Choosing Evernote as your GTD app comes with built in flexibility. You won’t be locked into hardware choices for the long-haul as you’ll be able to access your trusted system from whatever device you own (Mac, Windows, Android, iOS – with Linux rumored to be in the works).
Second – Evernote is flexible in the data types it can handle.
If you can digitize it, you can store it in Evernote. It doesn’t matter if it’s text, a web page, image, PDF, .mp4, Excel spreadsheet, audio file, or email. Evernote can store and organize it.
Gtd Notebooks In Evernote
This is a key differentiator in using Evernote as a GTD app and dramatically impacts the Capture phase of GTD’s 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow (more to come on this shortly).
And third – Evernote is flexible in its ability to organize data any way you like.
We know that GTD is a comprehensive life productivity methodology – one that asks you to track all that has your attention. This means you’ll be tracking lots of different use cases.
And, not all types of data should be organized in the same way. Something that goes through a process (for example an account that evolves from a lead, to a prospect, to an active client, to a closed deal) should be organized differently from something that holds a reference function (say, the user manuals for your oven, tv, and vacuum cleaner).
Because Evernote is an unstructured database, you can take the base set of organizational tools – notes, notebooks, stacks, and tags – and use them to organize your data however you want. This leads to heated debates within the Evernote community...and more on how you go wrong with organizing Evernote for GTD in a bit.
Savvy users can mix and match Evernote’s organizational tools to create different types of organizational structures within their account.
Basically, you have the freedom to organize vastly different data types in whatever way works for you!
When choosing Evernote as your GTD app, it’s important to understand that a reason Evernote is so flexible is that it’s “flat” in structure. You don’t create great levels of hierarchy in the tool (like you might with nested and sub-nested folders in Outlook, for example).
Setting Up Gtd In Evernote
Evernote devotees understand that there’s no deep hierarchical folder structure in Evernote. This isboth disruptive to the conventional way of digital organizing and also transformative to your productivity when understood.
Evernote Gtd Template
Flat and flexible is better because: