14. March 2019
Why and how I have shifted my GTD organization backbone in Evernote towards notebooks.
I have been using Evernote to manage my GTD tasks and projects from the very beginning. In case you haven't heard of the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology - the chance of this is pretty slim as it is very popular and gets much love on the Internet for well over a decade now - it is a conceptually very simple yet extremely powerful project management and self-organization system. Finding the right technical implementation of GTD for myself took some time and also involved some trial and error, but as soon as I have found The Secret Weapon (TSW), I have decided to go with it. It worked like a charm in general, it also has proven to provide great coverage of the GTD workflow. However, The Secret Weapon's approach is highly tag oriented and this technical detail has exposed some drawbacks with time. After living with these for a while, it was time to look into how I could hedge the elements of friction in the system while retaining the granularity and flexibility that the tag system of TSW has provided.
Using The Secret Weapon
TSW keeps things organized almost completely by tagging things: apart from the notes (tasks) being separated into Next Action, Completed and Cabinet (for the reference material) notebooks, all the contexts, priorities, project and other relationships are defined by tagging these notes. On a practical level, if you want to browse your next action items for a given context, priority and any other aspect, you have to search notes by filtering for multiple tags. This feels tedious, especially on mobile devices; the whole point of GTD is to make friction minimal while working on tasks and fiddling with the tags doesn't live up to this requirement in my mind at all. Ah, ok, but what about saved searches? - you say.
Saved Searches
A saved search is a great tool to have quick access to complex search terms with a single click (touch). Although saving searches is not available on all platforms (you can only save searches on Android locally, which isn't too useful), you can use the searches you have saved across all your devices. By using saved searches you can overcome the burden of having to run those complex searches that you find most useful again and again.
There are some caveats though. I have encountered a few issues while using saved searches: the search results were inconsistent at times, especially when running multiple saved searches consecutively on Android - this might be a bug I have seen every now and then. The other discomfort I have found with saved searches is, that if the tags on a note are changed, the search results list won't update based on the changes made to that note. You have to run search again if you want the note you moved into let's say, another context disappear from the results list view. This is most apparent when you are ramming through a list of tasks in the results list - for a given context - moving the completed items to the Completed notebook: the note remains in the list, which hampers clarity as to what is still to be done.
Hierarchy - and my mental map of categories.
With the tag system, all categories are created equal from a technical standpoint, while in my mental map, there are definitely dimensions of categorization, that are more prominent than others. For those categories, I just feel that projection into simply tags doesn't give me the cues and sense of structure I am expecting. For example: Contexts are unarguably the most important way of organizing your tasks in GTD; when completing tasks, I spend 90% of my time in just selecting different contexts depending on my situation. When processing things to do, I am usually a lot less interested in other aspects of the tasks, like the project it is linked to, or many times I am not even interested in priority. I just want to get things done. Should I still use simply use tags for contexts, like anything else? I think no.
My solution: more notebooks and stacks!
Usually I read, or at least skim the official Evernote newsletter. My inspiration came from Stacey Harmon's post in the April 26th 2018 issue. Stacey's post made great points on why going full tags is not a good idea in Evernote. Most of the story rang true to me and I felt some of the painful experiences she has highlighted myself. So I simply decided to give a try and shifted my most used selection criterion from a tag based organization to a notebook and stack based method. These were also the categories I felt the most friction with while using my GTD setup almost exclusively with tags. These were the following:
- Action contexts
- Project plans
For action contexts, instead of moving my notes (next actions) from my Inbox to the Next Actions notebook and tagging them for the appropriate context, I simply moved them into a notebook named after that context, then added any additional priority, project, whatever else tags to the note. To make this structure easier to grasp, here is how my structure looks like:
- Next Actions (stack)
- Phone
- Computer
- Online
- Home
- City
For project plans, I have simply created three notebooks: one for my active projects I am working on at the moment, one for projects, that are on hold for a longer period of time and finally one for finished projects:
- Project Plans (stack)
- Active Projects
- Projects on Hold
- Completed Projects
Other aspects of the organization, like the who, the when (priority) and what (project) have remained to be marked by tagging.
Outcome
The experience with my updated system has been great so far. I can stay much more in flux, the most common changes made to notes, like assigning tasks to a context, finding projects and changing their statuses cause much less cognitive load. Until today, there is only one drawback I have found: if a task can be completed in multiple contexts, you can't assign the note to multiple notebooks as you should.
I have managed to come up with two solutions for that; these worked pretty well for me: I have created more generalized contexts for the most common situations encountered: for example, when I am programming, that is something to be done at my computer; I don't want to do it on my smartphone, so that is a clear situation. But what about reading an article? I could very well do that on my smartphone as well, don't I? For those scenarios, I have created a general Online context, designating any situation I have access to the Internet. The other possibility is for situations where the competing contexts are unrelated so no generalization is possible, or if it is an scenario too rare to justify the creation of a generalized context. In these cases, just create multiple notes in each context notebook desired. Yes, it is unconvenient, but in my experience this is a very rare occasion, so the benefit of the streamlined organinization far outweighs this inconvenience.
For me, the takeaway is that the tags vs. notebooks battle is pointless and the sweet spot is somehwere in between in a hybrid system. What makes sense to me is creating the main backbone structure of your information using the notebooks and stacks, mainly because that concept is closer to how you would organize the information in the physical world, so in my experience it is easier to wrap your head around it as a result. Use the tags extensively to add the extra layers or granularity that you need to have laser focus in what you want to do. As in most cases, uniting the best of both worlds wins hands down, but you have to find the balance yourself.