“Don’t blame the car­pen­ter. Blame the tool.” –Howie Long in a new Chevy commercial

Am I the only one who thinks he’s call­ing that guy a tool? Any­way, I’m not going to com­plain about my tools today, so much as doc­u­ment one more step in my never-​ending quest to find bet­ter tools for writing.

My grand Google Docs exper­i­ment lasted all of two chap­ters into Cru­sade, the sec­ond book in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series. It’s entirely pos­si­ble that this has noth­ing to do with Google Docs, but when I hit a slump one of my first impulses is to mix up how I do things. As it hap­pens, a major improve­ment to an old friend hap­pened along at just the right time.

Ever­note

Two days before Christ­mas, Ever­note gave us iPhone users an early gift. Ever­note for the iPhone ver­sion 3.2 fixes most of the prob­lems I had with the iPhone ver­sion. Sync­ing is no longer modal, mean­ing you can search and do other things while sync­ing to your data­base, and you can store selected note­books locally on the device, mean­ing you can always access them offline even if you’ve never opened that par­tic­u­lar note on your iPhone before. While Ever­note for the iPhone still doesn’t allow you to edit rich text notes directly, ver­sion 3.2 does allow you to make a plain text copy and edit that rather than just append­ing to the rich text note. This allows for revi­sions I couldn’t do before.

These changes make Ever­note vastly more use­ful to me for writ­ing on the go. And of course it doesn’t hurt that the lat­est build of the 3.5 beta — yes, I know I said I wasn’t upgrad­ing, I have a sick­ness — is pretty solid as well. These changes are so impres­sive, in fact, that I’ve gone back to Ever­note for my actual draft­ing. I keep each chap­ter in a sep­a­rate note, tagged as “draft” and in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles note­book. I really like hav­ing all my stuff in one place again.

BTstack Key­board Driver

Of course, writ­ing on the go with just the on-​screen key­board on my iPhone only works for rel­a­tively short pas­sages. For any kind of speed, I’d still need my net­book, with the addi­tional five pounds — 3 for the net­book, 2 for the AC adap­tor and cables — to lug around that this would entail, right? Not so much. The BTstack Key­board Dri­ver also appeared on Cydia last week. This is part of the over­all BTstack project, intended to pro­vide an alter­na­tive Blue­tooth stack for the iPhone that han­dles pro­files Apple chooses not to sup­port. The key­board dri­ver, as you might expect, allows the iPhone to use exter­nal Blue­tooth key­boards using the Blue­tooth HID (Human Inter­face Devices) profile.

I still have my Think­Out­side Blue­tooth Stow­away from my Win­dows Mobile days, so I paid my five bucks, down­loaded and installed the dri­ver and set about test­ing it. It’s def­i­nitely still a work in progress, but it’s very promis­ing. Not all of the ancil­lary keys work, and some­times I get a string of garbage char­ac­ters, but over­all, it works for get­ting text into the iPhone fast and easy on a full-​size key­board (my Stow­away is actu­ally mar­gin­ally more com­fort­able than my 92% full size key­board on my net­book). So add this to Ever­note and now I don’t have to take my net­book with me to Chipo­tle for lunch. My back and shoul­ders already thank me.

Enso Words

Writ­ing in Ever­note has a few dis­ad­van­tages, chief among them that Ever­note has no word count func­tion. How do I track my progress with­out work count? Enter Enso Words. This is a small util­ity pro­gram that runs all the time in your Win­dows sys­tem tray and waits to be called either by hold­ing down the Cap­slock key like a sec­ond shift key, or as I pre­fer, tap­ping the Cap­slock key and enter­ing a com­mand and enter, or esc to go back to what you were doing. When you have Enso Words acti­vated, you can have it per­form a vari­ety of func­tions on what­ever text you have selected in vir­tu­ally any application.

So to get a word count on my cur­rent note in Ever­note, I:

1. Hit Ctrl-​A to select all text
2. Tap Cap­slock to invoke Enso Words
3. Type “wo” to nar­row down the com­mand selec­tion to “word count”
4. Hit Enter

Enso words then pops up a lit­tle box on screen with my cur­rent word count, and that box fades away auto­mat­i­cally as soon as I type some­thing or move the mouse. With a lit­tle prac­tice, this becomes sec­ond nature. I could even shave off a key­stroke if I used Enso in “qua­si­modal” mode and just released Cap­slock after typ­ing “wo”, no longer hav­ing to hit enter to send the com­mand. Enso is also great for look­ing up def­i­n­i­tions and syn­onyms, spell check­ing in any appli­ca­tion, chang­ing case, search­ing Google and more. It’s free, and takes up very lit­tle sys­tem resources, even on my netbook.

Write­Mon­key

When I want to get hard­core, though, I break out the mon­key. Write­Mon­key. This is a text proces­sor for Win­dows inspired by the pop­u­lar Write­Room on the Mac. While it works win­dowed — and that’s how I use it at the office — it’s really intended to run full screen. In full screen mode, Write­Mon­key takes up your entire mon­i­tor, hid­ing even your Win­dows taskbar and shows you just what you need to see to write. It’s small, fast, portable and keeps a run­ning word count at the top or bot­tom of the screen so you can see how you’re doing. The idea here is to remove all the dis­trac­tions and just write.

Write­Mon­key doesn’t inte­grate auto­mat­i­cally with Ever­note, but it’s not all that hard to get them to play together. I select all the text in a note like I would with Enso, but then copy it, fire up Write­Mon­key, paste and start writ­ing. When I’m done, I select all and copy from Write­Mon­key and then paste back into the note in Ever­note. Pretty simple.

Google Docs

I still use Google Docs for one thing: spread­sheets. I keep my word counts there in a sim­ple sheet that holds the word count for each chap­ter and then sums them to tell me the word count for the over­all novel. And hey, I can even update Google Docs spread­sheets on my iPhone! (Now I just need Enso Words for the iPhone.)

So that’s it, my new sys­tem, designed to be the sim­plest I’ve come up with yet (since it can’t really han­dle for­mat­ting, there’s no temp­ta­tion to spend time mak­ing it pretty). How do you take your writ­ing on the go?

I was going to talk about my new sooper seekrit plan to release and mar­ket Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles today, but I expe­ri­enced some tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties recently that I just have to rant about. We’ll get to the busi­ness plan stuff, I promise. Eventually.

But first, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

For quite some time now, my writ­ing sys­tem has been rel­a­tively sim­ple and has served me well. I have a note­book in Ever­note for each of my major projects. In each, I have var­i­ous sup­port mate­ri­als along with a note for the man­u­script itself. In this note, I have the out­line for the book in plain text and a .docx file attach­ment for the man­u­script. When it comes time to edit, I open the note, dou­ble click on the attach­ment and edit the doc­u­ment. Ever­note is smart enough to update the note/​attachment every time the file I’m work­ing on is saved (it’s in a temp folder on my hard drive, but that doesn’t usu­ally mat­ter). I also keep my progress spread­sheets in sim­i­lar notes and work on them in a sim­i­lar way.

Until yes­ter­day, this sys­tem worked flaw­lessly. I have Ever­note on every PC I use: my work desk­top and lap­top, my per­sonal net­book, my iPhone. It all works great. Right up until it doesn’t.

A while back, I upgraded my net­book to use the new Ever­note 3.5 beta. Keep in mind, here, that I used to be a pro­fes­sional soft­ware devel­oper. I would never trust my writ­ing to some­thing in the alpha stage of devel­op­ment, but a beta is sup­posed to be rel­a­tively sta­ble, just not fea­ture com­plete (see the Win­dows 7 beta as an exam­ple). Ever­note has made it clear that they will not be sup­port­ing 3.1 very long after 3.5 is offi­cially released, so I fig­ured I may as well start get­ting used to it. So I installed 3.5 Beta 4(!) and set about my work.

Yes­ter­day, the unthink­able hap­pened. Some­how, as I was open­ing the note con­tain­ing my man­u­script, the attach­ment for my man­u­script com­pletely dis­ap­peared! I wasn’t able to undo, and the desk­top synced the change back to the server, so I wasn’t able to pull the attach­ment from any of my other Ever­note clients. It was just gone. Noth­ing in the trash in Ever­note, just gone. 57,000 words of fic­tion, nearly 60 hours of work.

I scoured my hard drive look­ing for a backup or copy of the file. In the third place I looked, I found some­thing that looked promis­ing, and was able to get the file back. If that hadn’t worked, I would have been forced to recon­struct it from emails sent each day to my beta readers.

Psst, pro­gram­mers. Yeah, you. C’mere. You NEVER, EVER screw with the user’s data! A friend of mine pointed out that I was using beta soft­ware, but ANY bug that can irre­triev­ably destroy a user’s data should never have made it past alpha stage! I’ll accept a beta pro­gram crash­ing, but I will NEVER be okay with it trash­ing my data!

/​whacks Dave Eng­berg in the head

So I decided to take my data else­where. If I can’t trust Ever­note to never, ever lose my data, I can’t trust it at all. What else is out there?

A lot of peo­ple rec­om­mend Drop­box. So if fig­ured, sure, I’ll give it a go. I installed it on my net­book, and hey, so far, so good. The UI is clean and effi­cient, and it doesn’t seem to kill my Via CPU net­book (it pre­dates the Atom, we’re talk­ing stone age net­book). Doc­u­ments saved to fold­ers inside the “drop­box” folder on my desk­top are auto­mat­i­cally synced both to the cloud and any other PCs I have linked to my Drop­box account. Feels a lot like Microsoft’s Live Mesh, only about a kajil­lion times faster.

And it worked great until I got to work this morn­ing and tried to install it on my office PC. Ever­note works fine over my cor­po­rate proxy server. It uses the same proxy set­tings as Inter­net Explorer, set up in the Con­trol Panel, so it never even asked. It just worked. And while Drop­box claims to do the same, it doesn’t work. Nor does it work if I man­u­ally set up the proxy set­tings in Drop­box itself, which it does allow for (Seesmic for Win­dows doesn’t, which is why I can’t use it at the office). No mat­ter what I do, I can’t get Drop­box to con­nect to the cloud through our cor­po­rate net­work gob­lins. Stu­pid goblins.

So that’s two highly regarded file sync solu­tions blown out of the water by my par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances. I don’t trust Ever­note any­more — even after down­grad­ing it back to 3.1, because I know I can’t keep 3.1 indef­i­nitely — and I can’t use Drop­box on the PC where I spend half my wak­ing hours. So what’s left?

Sadly, the only thing that comes to mind is good old Sneak­er­net. I have a 2GB thumb­drive on my key­chain, and for now, I’m just going to put every­thing on there, and peri­od­i­cally use Microsoft’s Sync­Toy to back it up to the Drop­box folder on my net­book. That way I can access my files on any PC — well, any PC that uses Microsoft Office 2007, because I’m not giv­ing up Word; I’ve tried Google Docs and found it lack­ing — and as long as I remem­ber to run Sync­Toy every so often, they’ll get backed up to both my net­book hard drive and the cloud. It’s an inel­e­gant solu­tion, because it relies on my markedly unde­pend­able wet­ware to remem­ber to back it up, but that’s all I’ve got. Every other solu­tion I know of doesn’t meet my require­ments: sup­port my cor­po­rate net­work, run on both the iPhone and Win­dows, and be safe and dependable.

How do you store your work­ing manuscripts?

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?

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?

If I’m going to use Ever­note for GTD because of how amaz­ing it is as an uni­ver­sal inbox, I need to develop a sys­tem that actu­ally exploits Evernote’s strengths, rather than sim­ply trans­lat­ing the paper note­book GTD work­flow to it. Ever­note is dig­i­tal, and that gives me a dif­fer­ent set of assump­tions than a paper note­book. Specif­i­cally, the paper time man­age­ment law of “touch each piece of paper only once” doesn’t apply in the dig­i­tal world.

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.

As my Twit­ter fol­low­ers know, I’ve been pretty peeved with Ever­note recently. The iPhone client ver­sion has decided that it absolutely, pos­i­tively will not com­plete a sync with the Ever­note servers on my 3G. I’ve done every­thing I can, even sent my log files to the com­pany (no response as of yet), and all of my tou­bleshoot­ing comes down to the same thing. Even after a fresh reboot of my iPhone, with 30MB of RAM avail­able (the most a 128MB 3G ever gets after load­ing the mobile ver­sion of OS/​X), Ever­note will fight for a while and then either spit up the error mes­sage you see here or just crash com­pletely and dump be back to the home­screen, the typ­i­cal reac­tion when an iPhone app runs out of RAM. (The new iPhone 3GS seems to run Ever­note just fine, but then it would; it’s got 256MB of RAM, or five times the free RAM on boot as the 3G has, 150MB com­pared to 30MB.)

The prob­lem with this is that up until just a cou­ple days ago, the mobile web ver­sion of Ever­note wasn’t all that impressive.

This was a pain in the ass to use on my Win­dows Mobile devices, and it’s a pain in the ass to use on my iPhone. It’s a sim­ple WAP-​style page that doesn’t do much. But hey, it worked on my iPhone when the ded­i­cated client didn’t, so at least it was some­thing. I only used it for look­ing up notes, opt­ing to email new notes to my pri­vate Ever­note email address when I wanted to cre­ate some­thing new. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

Well, now it’s pretty too.

The new ver­sion of the mobile web Ever­note uses some nice iPhone/​Androidish CSS to look far more pro­fes­sional, more like a real app than a web page. It even sports some slick new menus that are both touch friendly and easy to use.

It’s a webapp rather than a native app, but that really isn’t a prob­lem for me. I’m already using the Safari-​optimized Gmail instead of the iPhone’s Mail client for read­ing my Gmail, the Safari-​optimized Google Reader instead of Byline, and iPhone-​friendly ver­sions of Google News, AP News, GoodReads, Wikipedia, the list goes on and on. Using webapps instead of native clients is a way to mul­ti­task on the iPhone with­out jail­break­ing and run­ning Back­grounder since you can have up to eight pages open at a time. And the inter­face for man­ag­ing them even bears a strik­ing resem­blance to man­ag­ing cards on the Pre.

Only one prob­lem remains, really. There is a JavaScript-​based clip­per avail­able for Safari Mobile that allows you to send what­ever you’re cur­rently look­ing at to Ever­note. The JavaScript looks like this:

javascript:location.href=‘http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title);

And it works.

The prob­lem, as you can see above, is that this script directs you to the full size ver­sion of Ever­note rather than a mobile page. This is espe­cially awk­ward when try­ing to tag what you just clipped.

I’ve tried every vari­a­tion I can think of to merge the JavaScript above with the URL of the new mobile site:

https://www.evernote.com/mobile/MobileSetup.action?noRedirect=true

And noth­ing seems to work. So for now, I’m deal­ing with the awk­ward clip­ping in Safari, but pretty happy with the rest of the Ever­note Mobile Web expe­ri­ence. So much so that I’m really not even all that wor­ried about the iPhone client. The mobile web ver­sion does almost every­thing I need, and for the rest — pho­tos and other mul­ti­me­dia — I can email stuff to Ever­note. All I’m really miss­ing is the iPhone client’s offline favorites, but I’ll live.

I got a request on Twit­ter recently (hi, @girvo!) to update how I use GTD now that I’ve switched plat­forms. It’s pretty sim­ple, and if you’ve been read­ing my stuff recently, it should come as no sur­prise that I’m doing it almost entirely in Evernote.

I have every­thing in one big note­book now in Ever­note, using tags and saved searches to find things (à la Gmail). For things in my GTD sys­tem, I have two tags to use: “!GTD” (the intial bang sorts it at the top of the tag list and dis­tin­guishes it from the tag “gtd” which I use for notes about GTD) and “Con­text”. If I bring up notes with the !GTD tag, I see at least eight notes, some­times more:

.Projects

This is a list of projects, out­comes I want to achieve that con­sist of more than one action. For example:

Write Titanus first draft

Write Rev­e­la­tion first draft

Post to JeffKirvin.net at least once a week

Paint bath­room

.Someday/​Maybe

This is a list of things that have been on my mind, but I have no com­mit­ment to accom­plish them in the fore­see­able future:

Stream media from PC to TV

Use Wii Fit for workouts

.Wait­ing For

This is a list of things I have on hold until some­one else gets back to me. I con­sult this once a week to see if I need to ping people.

All of the lists that begin with an at sign are con­texts, and tagged as such so that I can have a saved search called “Task Lists” that shows only those notes.

@Computer

This is for next actions that require some kind of computer/​internet access, but no spe­cific resources (like my iTunes library on my home desk­top or the tick­et­ing sys­tem we use at work). Basi­cally this is stuff I can do with my iPhone if necessary.

@Home

Both house­clean­ing and com­put­ing tasks that require a com­puter at my house (iTunes and gam­ing stuff, mostly) go on this list.

@Work

This is for stuff I have to do at the office.

@Out

This is mostly for errands or things involv­ing my car.

@Phone

And lastly, a list for phone calls I have to make. This is usu­ally a pretty sparse list as I avoid voice calls as much as pos­si­ble, pre­fer­ring less intru­sive and time asyn­chro­nous SMS and email.

I cur­rently also have a cou­ple projects I’ve removed from the .Projects list so I can do “back of the enve­lope” plan­ning. For exam­ple, I have a note called “Fix Neon” con­sist­ing of:

Get engine diagnostic

Check heat issue

Replace wind­shield

Replace tail­lights

Fix dash­board short

Replace dri­ver door

Replace pas­sen­ger mirror

Replace steer­ing column

(yes, there’s a rea­son my friends refer to my car as the Mil­len­nium Falcon)

For things that are time-​sensitive, I sched­ule the next actions on my Google cal­en­dar. For things that have to be done at a spe­cific time, I put them at that time, but for most things that have to be done just on a cer­tain day, I sched­ule them as free, all-​day events.

For col­lec­tion, I can have any num­ber of notes, all tagged with “Inbox”. These can be pic­tures, voice notes, text notes, even clipped web pages. Every so often, I go through my Inbox saved search and process these, adding new projects or next actions to my core lists as necessary.

When I’m on the go and look­ing for some­thing to do, I’ll bring up my Task Lists saved search in Ever­note and open the appro­pri­ate con­text. When I’m done with a task, I sim­ply delete that row. Ever­note sup­ports adding check­boxes to notes, but doing so means I can’t edit those notes on my iPhone, some­thing that’s vital to my sys­tem. So I keep it sim­ple, my notes in Ever­note not all that dif­fer­ent from the paper note cards so many GTDers use.

To me, the real advan­tage of this sys­tem is that it will work any­where. Win­dows PC, Mac, Linux (through Evernote.com), iPhone, Black­berry, Win­dows Mobile or just about any­thing else that can use either the full or mobile ver­sions of the Ever­note web­site. As long as I have an inter­net con­nec­tion, I have GTD. And even when I don’t have an inter­net con­nec­tion, I have the cached ver­sions of my lists that I’ve marked as favorites on my iPhone, so I at least have older ver­sions to work with.

How are you using GTD?

Every­one knows Ever­note is great for note tak­ing, but what else are note­books for? Specif­i­cally, for writ­ers? That’s right, drafts. And with Ever­note, I can com­pose both arti­cles and fic­tion on any device: locked down work PC, desk­top at home, net­book, Win­dows Mobile and yes, even my iPod Touch.

I wrote my first novel, Between Heaven and Hell, almost entirely in long­hand in a paper day plan­ner, typ­ing the pages in at night when I got home. In large part, it was this expe­ri­ence that led me to my focus over the last decade on tech­nol­ogy for mobile writing.

As com­put­ing moves into the cloud and more of us have mul­ti­ple com­put­ers to use through­out the day, I’ve been look­ing for a solu­tion for not so much as mobile writ­ing as ubiq­ui­tous writ­ing. The abil­ity to access the projects I’m work­ing on or jot down new ideas any time, any­where. And the cen­ter of my sys­tem is Evernote.

If you haven’t seen Ever­note before, it’s a mul­ti­plat­form note tak­ing and retrieval appli­ca­tion. You can use it on the web, on Win­dows (installed or portable), on the Mac, on the iPhone, Win­dows Mobile and a mobile web ver­sion for other phones. The data all syncs to the cloud, so what you save in place shows up every­where else. You can orga­nize your notes in mul­ti­ple note­books, and each note can also be tagged with key­words. And of course, you can search for any aspect of a note, from con­tents to date mod­i­fied. (Notes even have fields to store your GPS coor­di­nates from when you cre­ated them.)

Obvi­ously, this is boon for writ­ers when it comes to research. But what I’ve dis­cov­ered is that it works just as well for writ­ing copy itself. Every arti­cle I write for my blog, and every chap­ter of nov­els I write, begin as notes in Ever­note. They all live in my “Writ­ing” note­book, with blog entries tagged with “JeffKirvin.net” and chap­ters tagged with the name of the book they’re a part of. Then I just start typing.

I’ve found that I pre­fer the var­i­ous ded­i­cated clients to the web ver­sion, just for speed. I use the portable Win­dows ver­sion run­ning off a thumb­drive at the office, installed Win­dows clients on my net­book and home PC, and I have Ever­note installed on both my Win­dows Mobile-​based Touch Pro and on my iPod Touch. Stuff that I’m cur­rently work­ing on is tagged with “!Quick­Ac­cess” so I can just search on that tag and see every­thing at once.

On the iPod Touch, I have to be mind­ful that on that device I won’t always have an active inter­net con­nec­tion, mean­ing I can’t guar­an­tee I’ll be able to pull notes down from the cloud. Mobile clients don’t store every­thing locally and sync the way the desk­top clients do. They basi­cally just pro­vide a faster inter­face to your web-​based notes. But the excep­tion is that on the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can mark indi­vid­ual notes as “favorites” (they get a lit­tle star) and those notes will be locally cached on the device for offline access. So I make sure every time I access some­thing on my Quick­Ac­cess list on the iPod that I star it as a favorite.

There is one catch I feel I should men­tion. On both the iPhone and Win­dows Mobile clients, you can view any note you want, but you can only edit plain text notes. Any rich for­mat­ting– ital­ics, bold, chang­ing the font– will make the note read-​only on the mobile device. Since I’m using this for drafts, not pre­sen­ta­tion, this doesn’t really affect me much. I write every­thing in plain text and then add for­mat­ting only when I copy the text into either Word (for fic­tion) or Live Writer (for blog­ging). But I thought it war­ranted a men­tion just to save peo­ple some of my ini­tial confusion.

If you want the capa­bil­ity to write any­where you have a PC or a phone, no mat­ter what it is, Ever­note might just be the tool for you. I breathe a lot eas­ier know­ing that not only is all my writ­ing auto­mat­i­cally backed up to the cloud, but that I can get to it, add to it and edit it from wher­ever I may be.