{"id":453,"date":"2018-01-22T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/?p=453"},"modified":"2018-01-22T07:56:36","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T12:56:36","slug":"getting-organized-in-2018-evernote-and-meetings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/blog\/2018\/01\/22\/getting-organized-in-2018-evernote-and-meetings\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting organized in 2018 – Evernote and meetings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction to the series<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week<\/a> I described how I combine my new Everything notebook<\/a> with my electronic task manager, OmniFocus<\/a>. In looking over last week\u2019s post, I realized that I only described how OmniFocus integrates with my Everything notebook. I didn\u2019t describe how I use it to organize and track projects. That\u2019s worth a post (or two) in itself, but it makes more sense for that post to come near the end of this series, since the way I use it depends heavily on the other applications I use.<\/p>\n

Today I\u2019m introducing Evernote<\/a>, which I\u2019ve been using since February 1st, 2009. The only other applications I\u2019ve used that long are Emacs<\/a> (a very powerful text editor I\u2019ve been using since the late 1980s), gcc<\/a> (the GNU compiler collection), Firefox<\/a>, Thunderbird<\/a>, and the Microsoft Office suite.<\/p>\n

Evernote is, as its name suggests, is an application in which to store notes, but that barely scratches the surface of what it can do. Not only does it synchronize across all of my devices – the laptop I\u2019m writing this on, the desktop that\u2019s my primary machine in the office, my iPhone, and my iPad -, but the notes can include images (imported or snapped with the camera on my iPhone or iPad) and documents in a variety of formats (including Word and PDF). Evernote indexes all of these notes for easy searching, and<\/strong><\/em> it even indexes text inside images or PDFs (in the premium version).<\/p>\n

So what does this have to do with meetings? I find it very distracting when others bring a laptop or iPad to a meeting and use it to take notes. They seem distracted by the technology rather than being engaged in the meeting. I may simply be projecting my own behavior, but I found early on with my iPad that I couldn\u2019t focus on the meeting and take notes on my iPad at the same time. Instead, I take notes with pen and paper (now in my Everything notebook), but for any meeting where I am likely to want the original notes, I scan them (using my iPhone now) and incorporate them into an Evernote note (or put them on Dropbox – more on Dropbox<\/a> vs. Evernote in a couple of weeks). Once in Evernote I can put them into an appropriate notebook and tag them to make it even easier to find them in the future.<\/p>\n

When I\u2019m leading a meeting, I also make notes ahead of time (typically with Ulysses<\/a>) and sync the notes to Evernote so that I can refer to them. Then I can add notes from the meeting to the pre-meeting notes,1<\/a><\/sup> or I can use the \u201clink\u201d feature in Evernote to provide links from each note to the other.<\/p>\n

I find that this approach gives me all of the advantages of an electronic notebook – portable, accessible, searchable – and all of the advantages of pen and paper – ease of use, lack of distraction, reliability. Your mileage may vary, but it works for me.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I\u2019m typically not organized enough to call my notes an agenda. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Introduction to the series Last week I described how I combine my new Everything notebook with my electronic task manager, OmniFocus. In looking over last week\u2019s post, I realized that… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}