Robert Schultz

Getting Things Done with Evernote

In the past few weeks at work since my role has changed I’ve been actively trying to maintain all of my notes digitally. This process will allow me to easily go back and search or filter on previous notes I had taken or to recall notes from a specific sprint planning session.

I originally went with Microsoft OneNote. It’s a decent piece of software with most of the features you’d expect from a fancy note taking application. But I have found some definite flaws with this software.

First, how it synchronizes my notebooks. You never have the notion anything I ever being synchronized. Ever. I have to manually click the sync panel and either see it being synchronized or manually sync it myself. This isn’t the most obvious interface and is a bit confusing.

Also, sharing a notebook with someone is very tedious. If I want to share something easily I need to first enable the notebook to publish to the web (see above) then I have to enable the notebook in SkyDrive if this is even an option. Again, a huge pain. Sharing does not seem to be the focus of OneNote. One nice feature to have would of been the ability to integrate into Exchange deeper with the ability to share directly with someone within our Active Directory.

So I started looking into Evernote again. I used this product years ago and it has dramatically evolved. Really great sharing functionality. Great mobile app support. The ability to define tagging, you can use a browser and best of all it’s free.

The OneNote interface is not my cup of tea and I’ve converted all of my notes over to Evernote for now.