Evernote, or how I manage my ideas

growth

Finally, I got fed up by one habit. One highly annoying and happening over and over pattern I kept doing for years. Forgotten bookmarks, random Google Docs full of out of context jokes, ideas saved as a draft in Gmail - those are just a few out of many practices I mastered to misuse.

I am planning to achieve three goals with Evernote:

  1. Manage my daily/weekly/monthly TODOs
  2. Gather ideas for a next speech/blog/task
  3. Create knowledge repository

While goal 1. is just a matter of having separate notebooks and making sure to revision notes on daily basis, 2. and 3. require much more structure. I decided to go with a following structure:

  • Inspiration (quotes, videos, music, all that makes me feel uplifted)
  • Knowledge IT (stuff to help me to become a better IT expert)
  • Knowledge communication (wise materials about speaking, writing)
  • Knowledge business (entrepreneurship)
  • Knowledge life (everything else )
  • Books (I decided to keep all read books and long-read titles and summaries in one place)
  • My blogging (ideas to write about)
  • My speaking (ideas to speak about)
  • My life (goals, etc)
  • TODO

This is it. I wonder how my Evernote knowledge repositories gonna look in a few months :)

UPDATE 2016-12-12

My structure didn’t fit me well and GTD methodology came back like a boomerang. I’ve already established habit of checking my calendar and Evernote on daily basis, it was just about time to take it to the next level.

Ladies and gents, this is it, the right way to implement GTD in Evernote. I am using it for about one month now. Daily and weekly reviews help me to keep it clean and transfer closesed activities into my Google Calendar.


I'm Valdas Maksimavicius. I write about data, cloud technologies and personal development. You can find more about me here.