That’s been my gut feeling recently. Big companies scare the bejeezus out of me, because I don’t think I can trust them to do what’s best for their customers if it ever conflicts with what’s best for their bottom line. In particular, publicly traded companies are required by law to return as much value to their stockholders as possible. And more and more of them do that by squeezing the consumer.

So when I heard Evernote has a valuation of $1,000,000,000 en route to an IPO, I started squinting at them. Yes, they look trustworthy now. In fact, CEO Phil Libin has said on several occasions that he wants Evernote to be a hundred year company, and the only way they can do that is if their users trust them for life. But can they stick to their principles when the shareholders are screaming for more profit?

As it happened, this news hit right about the time I was getting annoyed with Evernote personally. It’s awesome on my Windows laptop. It’s arguably even better on Android. But their iOS client needs a lot of work, and that’s where I’m spending most of my time these days. On any note with more than 1,500-2,000 words or so, the iPhone version of Evernote slows to an unworkable crawl. This is with Markdown-formatted ASCII text, too, not rich formatting. Maybe this was a sign from the universe that I should be moving my writing to a safer, more controllable location. Like my own hard drive, synced to my other devices via Dropbox.

There are lots of Markdown-friendly plain text editors for iOS. Perhaps too many. Like any good former software developer, the first thing I needed to do was nail down my requirements. I needed to have a universal app that worked on both the iPhone and the iPad (I don’t have an iPad yet, but as soon as I can afford one, I’m getting it). Syncing to Dropbox needed to be automatic, not manual via a button. I don’t really care about export as HTML as my blog supports Markdown directly and I’ll be doing my own post processing for fiction, but HTML preview would be really nice. And given the small screen of the iPhone, I’d really like a full screen option; no UI chrome, just my words and the keyboard. Lastly, I need to be able to search for a specific phrase or some other way to navigate round in a large document.

That narrowed down the list to a handful.

• Nebulous Notes
• Notely
• Notesy
• WriteUp
• Writing Kit

Byword almost made the cut, but I couldn’t find a full screen option. Elements also gets honorable mention, but it has no search. And while the others technically met my needs, I discovered after days of testing that each one also had some kind of dealbreaking annoyance I couldn’t live with. Nebulous has a really clunky UI. Writing Kit is cluttered from trying to do too much. Notesy takes too long to refresh/sync every file in a folder as soon as you open the folder, whether or not you had any intention of opening that file. Et cetera.

And frankly, why is Dropbox charging almost five times as much per gigabyte of storage as Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive? Are they really five times better? Am I made of money? Will these damn kids ever get off my lawn?

So I took another look at Evernote, and hit upon a little known Evernote feature that might solve my problem. Note links.

If you right click on a note in Evernote, on of the options on the popup context menu will be “Copy Note Link”. You can then paste that into any note you like. I think you can paste it anywhere that supports hyperlinks, as long as you tell your computer to open Evernote to handle links starting with Evernote://

So here’s how I use note links to make writing fiction in Evernote manageable on my iPhone.

I have a “main” note for the full length work. For Crusade, book 2 of the Unification Chronicles, I’m doing something weird and writing the major plot threads independently of each other, planning to weave them together later. So I’m starting with Daniel’s story, and the main note is called UC2 Daniel.

Now I start cutting and pasting from the outline into separate notes. The first one is called Totally fake first thing in my outline and contains whatever notes or prose I’ve already written for that scene. Then I copy the note link in Evernote, and paste it into UC2 Daniel. Then I skip a line to make it finger-friendly on the iPhone, and do the same thing for the second scene, and so on.

When I’m done, I have a copy of my outline where every line item is linked to a note containing that scene. Want to edit that scene, I just click (or tap) on the link, and I’m taken to that note. When I’m done with that, I hit the back button in Evernote’s toolbar on the desktop, or the back arrow in the upper left of the iOS client, and I’m immediately back to my outline.

I can jump around the whole novel quickly this way, never losing track of where I am. I can reorder the chapters just by cutting and pasting the links within the main note (no renumbering!). And since each note remains around 1,000-1,500 words (I write short, punchy chapters to keep readers turning pages), the notes are never so big that they get clunky to edit.

Since the main note is a note and not just a table of contents, I can also add things to it to help me through the long process of drafting a novel. I put a checkbox in front of each link so I’ll know at a glance which ones are done and which ones I still need to write (like many novelists, I don’t necessarily write a book from beginning to end, but jump around). I can further organize the checklist into three acts, lining up the act breaks where they need to be. I can annotate the outline with notes to tighten this section up, or that something else is moving too fast. I can be as simple or comprehensive as I want, since this note itself won’t be in the final manuscript. (This would also be the ideal place to write the synopsis, since the outline is right here.)

And here’s the really cool part. This integrates cleanly into my Evernote GTD system I detailed on Monday. The links are independent of whatever tag or even notebook the note is in. So I can tag the notes with my GTD context tags (@anywhere, @computer) and move the current one and only the current one from my Writing notebook to my Action notebook so it shows up in my task lists. The links still work!

Of course, as I was writing this, Evernote updated their iOS client with major UI improvements on the iPhone. It’s now much easier to edit, file and tag notes on the iPhone. So maybe if I’d just waited, none of this would have been necessary. I’m glad it was, though, because linked notes are perfect for long-form document organization.

In addition to whatever folder structure you have already in Evernote, you need two new notebooks: Action and Hold. Action is set as my default folder, so new notes appear there unless otherwise specified. TSW recommends a whole big hierarchy of tags. I use just a few, for mostly for context.

My GTD system in Evernote is deceptively simple. Everything takes place in my default folder, and only have tags for contexts. At the note level, there is no difference between a one-off task and a project. This is not a violation of the GTD method, just a different way of implementing it. Here’s how the workflow works. Or flows. Or whatever it is that workflows do.

Collect

This is where Evernote really shines. Everything in my life eventually finds its way into Evernote. Interesting links from Google Reader or Twitter get emailed to my Evernote account (I need to start just retweeting cool stuff from Twitter with a @myen tacked on the to the end, which does the same thing, but also shares with my tweeps). I take pictures on my iPhone, and then dump them into the iPhone Evernote client (including using the iPhone camera to scan anything I get on paper that I want to “file”). Files, emails and memos pertinent to my job get clipped into the Windows Evernote client on my laptop. And of course ideas, tasks, random things I hear… anything interesting at all, it goes in the soup. Evernote is the best “universal capture” inbox I’ve ever seen, and why I keep coming back to it for my GTD process instead of services like Toodledo or Nozbe.

(This is, btw, probably the biggest thing I miss about Android after moving to iOS as my daily driver. Android’s system-wide share-to feature makes getting new stuff into Evernote much, much easier. On iOS, I have to settle for emailing a link rather than the whole clip if the app I’m using doesn’t happen to support Evernote directly. Come on, Apple! You copied Android’s notification system; copy this too!)

Process/Organize

I have a saved search in Evernote called Inbox. This search is defined as -tag:* in my Action notebook. This shows me every untagged note that still needs to be dealt with. I go down the list, starting at the top, and ask, “What is this? Is it actionable?”

If it’s not, it gets moved from the Action folder to whatever folder makes sense for reference and I move on. To keep things simple, I only have three reference folders: Professional, Personal, and Writing. A lot of time, I don’t bother to tag the note at all. I used to have dozens, maybe even hundreds of tags, but I finally realized that such granularity was slowing me down. Evernote’s search is so good that I don’t have to define keywords. If the word I’m likely to search for isn’t in the note itself, it’s probably not as relevant as I think it is.

If it is actionable, I do a little more thought on the matter. Is it a project? What’s the next action? If it’s a larger project I might do a little “back of the envelope” planning at the top of the note, pushing down what I’d already clipped, sketching out milestones. Then I determine the next action, and make that the title of the note. I assign one or more @contexts as tags, and then move on to the next item on the list.

This applies to my reading list, too. Articles I’ve clipped but haven’t read yet stay in the Action folder with a @reading tag, and I have a saved search called Reading List that displays them. When I’m done reading them, I just move them to the appropriate reference folder.

My Hold notebook is for stuff that isn’t complete, but can’t be done right now. Maybe I’m waiting for someone else to complete something, maybe it’s a blue sky someday/maybe idea. These get moved out of Action to Hold and reviewed regularly to see if they need to get moved back to Action and worked on.

Review

I have a lot of saved searches to help the review process. I’ve already discussed my Inbox saved search. The next one up is Planning, defined as all notes in the Action folder not tagged with @reading. This shows me all my open loops and active projects. I go over these every morning, trying to determine what’s really important for me to do that day. Those notes get tagged with @big rocks, a trick I’m borrowing from Stephen Covey’s First Things First.

I have a saved search called Focus defined as notes in the Action notebook tagged with @big rocks. This gives me a tight, focused list on the most important things I have to do. I come back to this list many times throughout the day to make sure these tasks get the attention they need.

For the rest of the day, I have saved searches that show notes in the Action notebook by context. These are:

• @anywhere stuff that can be done on my phone, which is always with me
• @computer stuff that requires my laptop
• @home stuff that has to be done in or around my apartment, like household chores
• @office day job stuff that needs to be done in my office

Do

Once I have the list up for the current context, I go down the list and do whatever feels “right”. I bounce around, almost never going down the list in order. I also keep an eye out for things that repeatedly get passed over, and try to figure out if they’re really doable, if I’m skipping them because they have the wrong next action or if it’s something I really have any intention of doing at all. It’s okay to look at some projects and decide, “I’m just not going to do that. I accept the consequences of it not being done.” These get moved out of the Action notebook or deleted entirely.

When I actually do something, I edit the note to change the title to the next action after what I just did, and if necessary change the context tag. I repeat as necessary so the project steams along until I run out of actions. Then it gets moved out of the Action notebook and fades into the searchable deep.

That’s it. Once a week I sit down and do a brain dump, just typing whatever pops into my head separated by CTRL-N to put each in a new note. Then I process them as listed above.

This is the simplest way of implementing GTD in Evernote I can think of, but no simpler. It hits all the major points, but also is streamlined enough that I’ll actually do it. Everything else I’ve tried has had too many steps involved to maintain the system, meaning I’ll inevitably get tired and wander off. This system looks like it’s easy enough to stick with, but if you have any suggestions on how to improve it, be sure to let me know in the comments.

I mentioned on Monday that Google has started to skeeve me out. Really, all the major digital ecosystems have started to skeeve me out. I don’t want to be beholden to any one company for everything. Putting all your eggs in one basket is no wiser now than in the analog age.

When I was handed an iPhone recently for my new day job, I decided to take the opportunity to see what other options are out there. To build my own ecosystem out of smaller, independent companies I can replace as necessary, and make it cross-platform wherever possible. To make my eggs work in any basket.

Getting Things Done

Exchange 365: When I started writing this article, I was using Google Calendar and Gmail for my “productivity” apps. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to see how many tendrils from the Big G I could disconnect. And the obvious answer for Calendar, Contacts and Email was hosted Exchange.

I’d had a hosted Exchange account years ago for my Windows Mobile devices. Technically, Google is also hosted Exchange, since they use Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol. But I wanted my own data store, my independence. So I looked around a bit and found that the cheapest hosted Microsoft Exchange service I could find was actually from Microsoft directly.

Exchange 365 is $4/month per user. Since I’m only doing this for myself, that’s $4/month. I get a full Exchange implementation hosted on my own subdomain (if I end up keeping it I’ll probably move it to my kirv.in domain) with mobile syncing and Outlook Web Access. Exchange syncs flawlessly with all my mobile devices, so this is working out nicely for me.

Evernote: Here’s another place I really divert from the Google Way. I used to keep my tasks in Google Tasks and my notes in Google Docs (and before that, Google Notebook, before it was shuttered). But Evernote does what I need so much better.

For notes, Evernote is an obvious choice. That’s what it’s for, after all. But what makes it a better choice than the Google offerings is how easy it is to dump stuff into Evernote from everywhere else. I can mail stuff into it, save from my browser, from my reading queue, pretty much everything else I do supports Evernote as a destination.

Which makes Evernote heads and shoulders above Google Tasks, too. I have a notebook in Evernote called “Action.” It’s my default notebook, so new notes appear there by default. For each note, I go through the normal GTD steps and use them as reminders of what I have to do. If they’re independent actions, I keep them in the Action folder until they’re done, then move the note to whatever folder is appropriate for reference. For projects, I make checkmarked lists in the notes and file them only when everything is checked off. This works better for me than any traditional to do list I’ve ever used, Google Tasks included. I’m working on an article describing this system in more detail for those of your who are interested in using Evernote for GTD.

Reading

Twitter: I get a lot of links to interesting reading material from the people I follow on Twitter. While I’ve tried getting everything this way by following the Twitter accounts of the blogs I generally follow, I’ve found that the ephemeral nature of Twitter means I miss too many links that way. So this is for stuff that I’ll find interesting, but that I probably wouldn’t have seen on my own. I use the stock Twitter client on all platforms, and just email the tweets linking to something interesting into my Evernote account.

(I used to use Google+ for this sort of thing, but it’s just too hard to get stuff out of G+, especially on iOS, and into Evernote where I want it. Further evidence of the “lock in” mentality that’s driving me away from Google in the first place.)

Google Reader: I keep all my regular, must-read blogs in Google Reader. Google’s just the best tool for the job for this, and I’m not going to ignore them out of spite. On iOS, I use RSS Flash g, an average GReader client that has one killer feature for me. I have it set up so that anything I star in GReader is automatically sent to Evernote, put in my Action notebook, and tagged with @reading. It literally could not be simpler to get the stuff I want to read later where I need it to be.

On the desktop, I generally open those articles in new tabs in Firefox and give them a closer look while I have the larger screen. If they really look interesting, I use the Firefox extension Clearly (by Evernote) to simplify the formatting and send the page and source URL to Evernote.

Evernote: Once everything’s in Evernote, the hardest part is finding time to read it all. I have a context set up as @reading and a saved search called “Reading List” defined as every note tagged @reading in the Action notebook. When I’m done reading an article, I just move it from the Action folder to one of my reference folders, along with adding any tags I feel are relevant. I try to keep my Evernote tags to a minimum, but I do have tags for each of my writing projects, so if an article is particularly applicable to some aspect of the Unification Chronicles, I’ll slap that tag on it to group it with the rest of my UC reference material.

Kindle, Calibre and Dropbox: For longer form reading, I’m sticking with Amazon’s Kindle platform for now. I’ve tried Nook and iBooks, and Kindle just does a better job of giving me what I want to read (books I bought from Amazon as well as those I bought elsewhere) everywhere I want to read it (iPhone, iPad to be procured later, Android phone, Windows PC, physical e-ink Kindle).

That said, I also download every book I buy on the Kindle store, strip it of DRM and file it in Calibre. I use the portable version of Calibre, and store both the app and my library in my Dropbox. Most books are stored in epub, mobi and zipped HTML formats for safe-keeping, and I can email any of the books I didn’t buy from Amazon directly to my Kindle library whenever I want to read them.

Writing

Evernote: It makes sense to keep my drafts together with my reference material, so I do all my actual writing in Evernote as well. While Evernote supports editing rich text notes even in the mobile apps (finally), as it turns out I don’t use it. I keep my drafts in plain text and use Markdown for rich text markup. This keeps things simple and I don’t have to worry about losing the formatting should something hiccup. The Evernote Windows client even supports word count, something I wish they’d add to the iOS client. When I’m done with a draft, I either paste the Markdown-formatted text directly into my blog (which understands Markdown thanks to a WordPress plugin), or convert it to HTML for conversion to ebook formats.

The Elephant In The Room

Between writing, reference and task management, I spend most of my day in Evernote. This may seem like putting all my eggs in a different, yet still consolidated, basket, but it’s worth pointing out that I could dump Evernote and switch to Simplenote or just a collection of plain text files in Dropbox at a moment’s notice if needed. Evernote is the most convenient for me, but certainly not the only option.

Social Networking

Twitter: As referenced above, Twitter’s pretty much the only social network I have time for anymore, and even that is mostly skimming for interesting links. For what I do with them, the stock iOS and Android clients are fine. I was really enjoying Flipboard on my iPhone, but there doesn’t seem to be a good way to get links out of it and directly into Evernote, so it fell by the wayside.

Google Voice: This will probably be the hardest Google dependency to shake, assuming I ever do. My phone number is a Google Voice number, and that’s how people call and text me. Efforts to find a similar universal texting solution, like Apple’s iMessage, have met with a collective “meh” from my friends, so I’m stuck with how they know to contact me. At least using Google Voice means I’m not locked in to any particular carrier or local phone number.

Web

FirefoxThis one’s easy. I need a modern standards compliant, cross platform web browser that doesn’t phone home and share everything I do online with Microsoft, Google or Apple. That leaves Firefox. (Shush, Opera users.) There’s a lot to like in Firefox over even Chrome, much less IE 9. In particular, I can set the fonts to what I want them to be and override the web site fonts. It’s a small thing, but I like consistency.

And of course Firefox now supports Sync, so I can have the same settings on both my work and personal laptops, and Firefox for Android on my Galaxy Nexus. It’d be nice if there was an iOS version of Firefox, but I guess we know who to blame for that one. As a stopgap I use Firefox Home for iOS, which at least gives me my bookmarks and tabs open on other devices.

Lastly, I like how Firefox is the most Fitts Law compliant browser on the market. Little things count.

Finance

CoinKeeper: I wish I could say I used Mint.com to keep track of my finances, but alas, they don’t get along with my bank’s security policies. For now, I’m using CoinKeeper for iOS, which does sync to their own cloud service so it’s interoperable between devices (this is less useful now than it will be when they release their iPad and Android clients, but it’s good for backup now). I’ll have a full review of CoinKeeper soon, but for now let’s say it’s the first mobile finance app I’ve really liked since QuickBudget on Palm OS, and for largely the same reasons.

Audio

iTunes: I know it’s old school, but I still have an iTunes library of almost 5,000 songs (DRM-free MP3 files), and sync a good 10% of that locally to my phone. I don’t always have good data coverage, and even when I do, I don’t always want to use part of my precious monthly data cap on streaming music.

Rdio: Not all of the music I like is music I own, however. My Rdio collection is much, much larger than my iTunes library, and I use this liberally to listen to stuff I either don’t have in iTunes, or want to listen to right now but don’t have synced to my phone.

Pandora: I also pay for a Pandora account and have a few dozen stations set up for various things I might be in the mood to listen to. Most of my Pandora usage, however, isn’t music at all, but stand up comedy, which I listen to via my iPhone (on wifi) on my nightstand as I fall asleep.

Stitcher: Probably at least half (or more) of the time I’m listening to audio on my phone, I’m listening to podcasts on Stitcher. What puts this podcatcher above the rest is that it’s multiplatform (iOS, Android, web browser) and syncs your queue and where you left off on each podcast across devices. Start listening to Tech News Today on my iPhone, finish listening through my laptop speakers in Firefox when I get home.

Audible: And of course for listening to actual audiobooks, there’s nothing better than Audible. I can listen on my iPhone, in iTunes, on Android, on my Kindle. And even though I’m no longer a monthly subscriber, I managed to collect over 500 audiobooks when I was, and I still haven’t listened to all of them.

Video and Photos

Dropbox: Until I decided Google had too much of my stuff, I kept all my photos in Picasa. As an Android and Google Plus user, this was almost default and automatic, since Google Plus would upload any photo I took with my phone to Picasa anyway. I’m in the process now of downloading all my photos from Picasa, filtering out the duplicates or the stuff I just don’t need anymore, and moving these into my Dropbox account. In Dropbox they’re still sharable, in a more independent location, synced automatically to all my PCs (local copies are important) and Dropbox will even add to my storage allowance to compensate for the extra space taken up by all the photos. I believe the same thing (within limits) applies to video, so I might upload some of my must-have videos there too.

Netflix: I’m a big fan of Netflix. They’ve had their issues recently, and lost a lot of content that I miss (come on, Warner, give back Babylon 5!). But for less than $10/month, I still have access to way more entertainment content than I can possibly watch. I’m working my way through all the Star Trek at the moment (halfway into DS9 season 4, then on to Voyager after DS9), and I still have all the various Stargate series to go through, all 300+ episodes. And people keep telling me how good Arrested Development is; I should probably watch it before the new episodes, commissioned by Netflix, air.

Amazon Prime: I bought my Amazon Prime membership mostly for the free shipping, kept it for the Kindle Lending Library (and more free shipping). But a useful side benefit of Prime is that I also have a large library of free video I can stream as a backup if I’m having problems with Netflix. Prime also has reasonably priced rentals of newer TV and movies.

I just started my new job, and on the first day they handed me my shiny new company phone: a Verizon iPhone 4. It’s preloaded with iOS 5.1, so I’ve been using it as my only phone for the week and I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised.

The screen is as sharp as I remembered, and no adjustment at all coming from the 720p screen of the Galaxy Nexus. While I still like Roboto, I’d forgotten how charming and clean Helvetica Neue feels. The screen on the iPhone is almost comically small compared to the Galaxy Nexus side by side, but viewed by itself, it’s fine. And I definitely do notice how much easier the iPhone is to use one-handed. My thumb can actually reach across the screen!

Let’s talk software. The biggest change I’ve noticed in iOS 5.1 is the new notification system. I’m not sure how much I like it yet. It feels like a mashup of the Android 4 and webOS notifications, which is essentially what it is. Apple took the ideas that they liked from their competitors and bolted them together. I’d like more variety in widgets (I’m only using Weather), but I really do like the ability to swipe directly across a notification popup on the lock screen to go right to that event. I’d say it puts iOS on par with the competition, but not ahead.

The iOS multitasking system still feels a little primitive compared to the thumbnails you see on Android and webOS. But it is snappy, which Android’s thumbnails sometimes aren’t, even on Google’s flagship device.

Finding apps to do everything I did on Android hasn’t actually been difficult at all. Instead of Epistle on Android to edit markdown-formatted text files on my Dropbox, I use Elements (the two are so similar I’d be surprised if Elements weren’t the inspiration for Epistle). I use Pocket Casts for podcast listening on both platforms. Evernote is mostly the same on both platforms (see below). And on iOS, I have EgretList again to help me use Evernote as a GTD system. Rdio, Pandora, WordPress, Roku, Google+, Google Voice… all pretty much the same on both platforms.

Currently, I’m reading in the Kindle app, which is actually a bit more advanced than the Android version. It supports “personal documents”, so I can email whatever .mobi formatted books I want out of my Calibre library to my Kindle email address and download them as fully functional ebooks in the iOS Kindle app. I also have Stanza installed and attached to my Calibre library, so I could read that way too if so inclined.

While we’re talking about reading, Flipboard, where have you been all my life? While iOS has a perfectly functional Google Currents app and a plethora of Google Reader apps, I can understand why people tout Flipboard as one of the great exclusive features of iOS. The layout is slick and attractive while also being quick, minimalist and easy to use. And being able to read Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Instagram all in one app is… ahhhh. If only it supported Reddit (using AlienBlue until it does) and Google+, it’d be perfect. Of course, the latter will require Google to release the gorram APIs.

It’s not all unicorns and bunnies, though. iOS still doesn’t support widgets on the home screen, and this is turning out to be a bigger impediment than I would have thought. Particularly with Evernote, the inability to quickly create a new note or voice transcription is slowing me down.

So, am I on iOS for good? Regular readers know that’s a ridiculous question. I change platforms the way some people change underwear. But yeah, I think I’m going to keep using the iPhone as my daily driver for a while. Part of it is practicality: I have to carry the iPhone for work, and if I can do with it what I can do with the Galaxy Nexus, why carry both? But mostly it’s just that I’m really enjoying seeing what iOS can do these days.

I will keep using the Galaxy Nexus for reviews, and for testing so that when I explain a new trick here, I can tell you how to do it on iOS and Android.

One of the most important messages to come out of last week’s iPhone 4 sneak preview event at Apple has kind of fallen off the radar. In the iAd part of the presentation, Jobs said, “Search has not happened on a mobile device like on the desktop. People spend all their time in apps; they go into Yelp and don’t do general searches. This is where the opportunity is—within apps, not search.”

This is a major departure from the message coming from Apple in the early days of the iPhone. In 2007, it was all about Mobile Safari, searching and web apps. Three years later, the platform has matured and a different use case has emerged. Most iPhone users don’t use Safari all that much. Even when they search, they do it in discrete apps rather than in Safari. When I want to find out who some guest star is in one of my favorite TV shows, I don’t open Safari or even the Google or Bing apps on my iPhone. I open the IMDB app and look it up from there. It’s faster, more targeted and an experience designed for the iPhone screen size.

Jobs gets this, and Apple’s new ad platform is designed to exploit that. Google figured out a decade ago that people are much more receptive to ads if they’re targeted to them and their specific interests. With iAd, Apple has removed a lot of the guesswork even further. If you’re using an app, you’re probably going to be most receptive to ads with the same focus as the app you’re using. This gives Apple even more reliable targeting than Google’s use of keywords.

But there’s another side to this as well, one that I think is interesting in an of itself. Google’s ads live, for the most part, in browsers, because that’s how most people interact with the internet on “big” computers. As a matter of fact, I’m typing this post on a netbook (though I started it in the WordPress app on my iPhone) and the only application I’m running is Firefox. In various tabs, though, I have Gmail, Google Docs, Pandora, Sobees for Twitter/Facebook and Meebo for IM.

But on my iPhone, I can go months without even opening Safari. It just doesn’t factor into my workflow, even though I use all the same web-based services on my iPhone that I use on my netbook and my desktop. The difference is that on my iPhone I have discreet app for each service. I have a Meebo app for IM that sends me push notifications when I have a new message. I use Reeder to keep up on my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I use Tweetie (soon to be just Twitter for iPhone) for Twitter. When I find an article I want to read later in either, I send it over to Instapaper, and read them in the Instapaper app. I use QuickOffice Connect to edit Google Docs directly, the iPhone’s Calendar app for my Google Calendar, Action Lists to give my Toodledo to-do list a GTD workflow.

So when Apple approved Opera Mini for the iPhone last week, I wasn’t surprised at all. Apple has demonstrated that they understand very well that browsers don’t matter on smartphones. Opera Mini is just another app, no more useful to the average iPhone owner than Safari, which is to say not very useful at all. It’s likely to be ignored most of the time, because that’s what happens to smartphone browsers. Smartphones are different than “computers” as we traditionally think of them, and while both platforms need access to the internet, how they do it varies greatly. The size of the screen makes a qualitative, not quantitative, difference in how the device is used and how it accesses information.

And if you think that last sentence means that devices like the Apple iPad and Microsoft Courier are something altogether different from both smartphones and full computers, well, that’s a post for another time.

I’ve gotten a few questions about how I use tags and notebooks in Evernote. Now, while I think one of the cool things about Evernote is that you can set it up however makes the most sense to you personally, I realize it helps to see how other people do it, if only to rule out what doesn’t make sense for you. So in that spirit, here’s the system I’ve developed so far.

My primary notebook is creatively named Default, and that’s where all of my notes start out and most of them end up. All but two of my other notebooks (Dish Network for day job stuff and Images for notes consisting entirely of pictures) are named for various writing projects, including a notebook for JeffKirvin.net. As you can see from the item counts, if you factor out the work and image notebooks, none of the project-oriented notebooks come anywhere near the size of the main notebook. They are handy, though, for quickly seeing everything related to a specific project in one place.

Tags are harder to keep organized. I have only six top level tags, and could probably get rid of two of them if I tried. But out of those, I really only use the first two (and their subtags): !GTD and !Reference. They’re prefaced with exclamation points so they sort automatically to the top.

The !GTD tag itself is never actually used at all. But it contains all my GTD contexts, as well as another tag, !Vision, for more Covey-style planning, goals, roles and values stuff.

For the vast majority of stuff in my Evernote database, each note will have either one or more @ tags representing the context in which I need to address the note contents, or it will be tagged simply with !Reference. I used to use a lot of keyword tags, but over time found I couldn’t keep them standardized well enough and that Evernote’s built in content search was more than sufficient to pull up notes I might have forgotten otherwise.

The only other tag worth mentioning is Bookmarks, which is where I put stuff that formerly would have gone into Delicious or Foxmarks (now Xmarks, or so I hear). Though honestly I’ve gotten so accustomed to typing whatever I’m looking for into the search bar on my browser that I hardly use bookmarks at all anymore. Starting to see a pattern here?

My GTD system in Evernote is deceptively simple. Everything takes place in my default folder, and I only have tags for contexts. At the note level, there is no difference between a one-off task and a project. This is not a violation of the GTD method, just a different way of implementing it. Let’s walk through the process to see what I mean.

Collect

This is where Evernote really shines. Everything in my life eventually finds its way into Evernote. Interesting links from Google Reader or Twitter get emailed to my Evernote account (I need to start just retweeting cool stuff from Twitter with a @myen tacked on the to the end, which does the same thing, but also shares with my tweeps). I take pictures on my iPhone, and then dump them into the iPhone Evernote client (including anything I get on paper that I want to "file"). Files, emails and memos pertinent to my job get clipped into the Windows Evernote client on my laptop. And of course ideas, tasks, random things I hear… anything interesting at all, it goes in the soup. Evernote is the best "universal capture" inbox I’ve ever seen, and why I keep coming back to it for my GTD process instead of services like Toodledo or Nozbe.

Process/Organize

I have a saved search in Evernote called !Inbox. This search is defined as -tag:* in all notebooks. This shows me every untagged note in my entire database. I go down the list, starting at the top, and ask, "What is this? Is it actionable?"

If it’s not, it gets tagged with !Reference and I move on. I used to have dozens, maybe even hundreds of tags, but I finally realized that such granularity was slowing me down. Evernote’s search is so good that I don’t have to define keywords. If the word I’m likely to search for isn’t in the note itself, it’s probably not as relevant as I think it is.

If it is actionable, I do a little more thought on the matter. Is it a project? What’s the next action? If it’s a larger project I might do a little "back of the envelope" planning at the top of the note, pushing down what I’d already clipped, sketching out milestones. Then I determine the next action, and make that the title of the note. I assign one or more @contexts as tags, and then move on to the next item on the list.

Review

I have saved searches for all of my contexts, plus one for Someday/Maybe. Whether I’m at my desk, at home or on the go, I fire up Evernote on whatever device is handy and check out the saved search for the context appropriate at the time. Currently, my contexts are:

• @Computer (things I can do anywhere I have one of my computers, pretty much anywhere)
• @Home (things that require me to be in or around my house)
• @Internet (things that require an unfiltered internet connection, ie things I can’t do on the corporate network because of our strict content filtering like downloading executables)
• @Office (things that require corporate resources)
• @Out (things I have to go to, rather than come to me)
• @Read/Review (reading material, by far the biggest list)
• @Shopping (things to buy, online or locally)

These are obviously defined by location, or more generally, resources available. Given that some of these (@computer, @read/review, @shopping) can be done anywhere I have my iPhone, which is pretty much everywhere, I’m thinking about adjusting my contexts to be more about resources and energy available. Like having a context for things that can be done in 5 minutes, things that will take an hour, etc.

Do

Once I have the list up for the current context, I go down the list and do whatever feels "right". I bounce around, almost never going down the list in order. I also keep an eye out for things that repeatedly get passed over, and try to figure out if they’re really doable, if I’m skipping them because they have the wrong next action or if it’s something I really have any intention of doing at all. It’s okay to look at some projects and decide, "I’m just not going to do that. I accept the consequences of it not being done." These get re-tagged with !Reference and fall off the lists.

When I actually do something, I edit the note to change the title to the next action after what I just did, and if necessary change the context tag. I repeat as necessary so the project steams along until I run out of actions. Then it’s also tagged with !Reference and fades into the searchable deep.

That’s it. If I’m looking for something to do and nothing appeals to me, I can go into my Someday/Maybe context and promote a few things to active projects by putting them in contexts titled by their next actions (although generally, I’m more likely to take a nap). Once a week I sit down and do a brain dump, just typing whatever pops into my head separated by CTRL-N to put each in a new note. Then I process them as listed above.

This is the simplest way of implementing GTD in Evernote I can think of, but no simpler. I hits all the major points, but also is streamlined enough that I’ll actually do it. Everything else I’ve tried has had too many steps involved to maintain the system, meaning I’ll inevitably get tired and wander off. This system looks like it’s easy enough to stick with, but if you have any suggestions on how to improve it, be sure to let me know in the comments.

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