We’ve all seen the new Bing com­mer­cials show­ing peo­ple suf­fer­ing from search engine over­load. I can iden­tify with those thus afflicted, since I go through that every day. Only it’s not hit­ting me when I search Google; it’s hit­ting me when I search Evernote.

Ear­lier this week I hit 6,000 notes in Ever­note. That’s a lot of notes. That’s a huge, thun­der­ing herd of notes, the likes of which used to roam hori­zon to hori­zon on the Col­orado plains. Wait, I think that was buf­falo. But even so, my notes were out of control.

This isn’t Evernote’s fault. It does a dandy job of col­lect­ing and keep­ing all my notes. Things, per­haps obvi­ously, go into the sys­tem rather eas­ily. Get­ting the par­tic­u­lar stuff I’m look­ing for back out at any par­tic­u­lar time can be a problem.

Like Google’s index of the entire inter­webs, once you hit a cer­tain crit­i­cal mass of notes, any search brings back too many matches. This forces you to browse through the list of matches to your search term when brows­ing a list and find­ing what you want with a Mark I eye­ball is exactly what you’d hoped to avoid. Ever­note pro­vides lots of ways to nar­row the search by con­tent, time and place cre­ated and all sorts of other meta­data, and allows you to save that com­bi­na­tion of search cri­te­ria if you need them again in the future. But even so, there’s lots and lots of stuff in my Ever­note data­base that doesn’t strictly need to be there. More to the point, there’s lots of stuff in my Ever­note data­base that I’ll never see again. So why lug it around, even digitally?

I think the source of my issue is that Ever­note is so free-​form that I’m inclined to use it for every­thing so that I have all of my data in one place, even though other solu­tions would work bet­ter for cer­tain kinds of con­tent. I should keep my image files in Picasa or Flickr instead of Ever­note. I should store my to-​read-​later arti­cles in Instapa­per instead of Ever­note. I should keep my drafts in Google Docs, Write­room or on a flash drive rather than in Ever­note. I should keep my tasks in Too­dleDo instead of Ever­note. I think if I put into Ever­note only what I knew I planned to keep so I could use it later, the data size would be man­age­able and it wouldn’t take nearly as long for the iPhone ver­sion to fin­ish sync­ing and let me look up what­ever I opened it for.

But before I go and do some­thing rash (I have an inner R2-​D2, and I’m not afraid to use it!), I thought I’d ask my read­ers (at least the ones that use Ever­note, and I know there are a few of you). What do you store in Ever­note and what do you store else­where? Why?