I’ve always thought of myself as an organised type of person, everything in it’s place even if it doesn’t appear so – you know the sort. I’m open to trying new things – technologies, note-taking techniques – in fact anything that will make my life more efficient.
Since starting my current study programme, I’ve found myself challenged regarding the choices of tools available whether it’s for creating a to-do list, note-taking, saving PDFs, managing references and citations, even email to which I admit that I struggle to get to grips with MS Outlook on my laptop, I just don’t like the user interface. Over the coming months I will capture my experiences in a series of blog posts and who knows, perhaps some tips will be forthcoming from some of you to help with my future efficiency and remove the chaos from my organisation. This post starts with my experience of the productivity tools – Things and the popular Evernote.
I first started using Things back in 2008. One of my team members had a trial on his desktop and I thought it looked interesting – capturing notes and action items, grouping them into projects and areas, adding updates, setting target dates and the best part, marking as complete once done – such satisfaction. I was so enthralled I purchased a family licence allowing up to 5 of us install and use it and I have to say it served its purpose well. I purchased the iOS version for my phone and in time a cloud based offering became available eliminating the need to sync across devices. Almost ten years on and these days I use it to keep summary notes of conversations with my research students, class feedback that might be helpful for the next cohort and my schedule of recurring household chores – yes, even the clean cycle for the dishwasher and washing machine!
I haven’t been an Evernote user for quite as long – a couple of notes are there from 2011 – mostly for planning holidays and moving house. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to use it but I do recall a conversation with a work colleague discussing the benefits of Evernote over Things and vice versa. In 2013 it appears that it was time for some home redecoration and I have a notebook containing photos and clips, my attempt at a mood board! Evernote is really good for clipping images and the like and this has been its primary purpose for me. I have one notebook with 75 recipes that I clipped, and have made some of them but I’m hardly a threat to Mary Berry!
In summary, the fact that I have paid for both tools (device licence for Things, annual subscription for Evernote) indicates that I have associated value with them. This is true. I have a stack of notebooks under ‘Education’ that I add to probably every day. Having used tags in Things for many years I’m very familiar with how useful they can be. Will I pay €30 for another year of Evernote Plus? Well, apart from the realisation that an automated subscription has just processed (must add a reminder to my Things list for next year!) the reason I subscribed a year ago was because Evernote’s pricing system changed and I thought I would use it for my studies across multiple devices. In truth, I use it on my laptop and one of my iPads and I rarely use the 1Gb upload allowance, nor do I forward emails to it. However, I’m shortly going on two weeks holidays which will be wi-fi free for the most part, so will see if I actually access any of the notebooks offline. If I don’t, it may well be that Basic access will suffice.
In conclusion, both Things and Evernote have been excellent productivity tools to help me stay organised over the years but one cannot replace the other. If any readers out there have experience or tips to share regarding either of these tools please feel free to add to the comments following this post.
Featured image courtesy of Pixabay
Sandra Flynn 
Thanks Sandra. I’m constantly trying to improve my information management system. In terms of the list review for my Doctoral thesis, I’m finding this to be a worthwhile process, using Office 365 apps:
Find article
Save it alphabetically to ‘Articles’ folder – Authors name(s) + title
Import the reference to RefWorks (consistent style; e.g. Harvard)
Copy the reference to ‘Bibliograhic Repetoire Table’ in desigbated Word Doc
Highlight key sentences when reading the article; summarise key point in the table
After going through a few article related to a particular, write sentences/paragraphs in the actual ‘Thesis’ Word doc
Ceate shortcut to the ‘Articles’ folder, ‘Bibliograhic Repetoire Table’ doc, and ‘Thesis’ doc on your desktop and phone/tablet homescreen
Populate the ‘Thesis’ doc with random thoughts, meeting summaries, etc. as you go.
I find that I do most of this work on my mobile phone on the go. I cycle for an hour a day to-from work, and listen to journal articles von my phone via my bluetooth headset thr
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Thanks Pat!
I was thinking about a future post on my challenges with Mendeley and Endnote. I like the library feature to send articles and books to Endnote and I label them later using the iPad app. I file them in my Dropbox folders with author name and title. Sometimes if a resource comes my way with a direct link I may forget to save to Endnote, but that’s not too often thank goodness!
I find it easier to highlight pieces when reading articles on the laptop, doing so on the iPad is a bit finicky, perhaps it’s just my fingers!
I see RefWorks as an option also in the library but I must have tried Endnote first, and with the plugin for Word I was able to write an assignment pulling in the references as I wrote. It wasn’t perfect every time, but not bad. Now I wonder why I didn’t use it for my most recent assignment 🤔
Thanks for taking the time to read my latest ramblings and sharing your tips.
S.
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Sorry, submited the last comment prematurely, and can’t retrieve/edit it. Anyway….listen on my phone via my bluetooth headset. There is an text-to-speech facility on an app called ezPDF Reader: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=udk.android.reader
Although listening to an article on the move may not be as focussed as reading it, it can be beneficial. It can rule out reading some articles afterwards, as it may just not be of interest. For articles that are relevant, it can make reading them all the better/easier, as you’ve engaged with the material already.
I hope this helps in some small way.
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