I’ve been playing with Evernote for some months now, and I’ve been gradually integrating it into my working life. I had a bunch of different requirements, and I’ve been able to bend Evernote to support all of them. It’s a web-based system for storing notes, and it also comes with clients for the Mac, PC and iPhone that you can use to synchronise your notes with those devices.

Those people who’ve read this blog in the past know that I use a virtual assistant. The one I’ve been using for a year or so now is named Kim, and she rocks. She lives in Kansas and we’ve never met, but she helps me with my day to day tasks. She arranges pickup and delivery of review products, and books personal and business appointments in the calendar. She’s like a personal concierge service, and at this point I’d be lost without her.

I talk to Kim a lot via email and Skype, but I had problems keeping track of the tasks that I’d given her, and of the tasks that I needed to do myself. I still found myself a disorganised mess, even with an assistant to help, so I looked for a system that I could use to co-ordinate both my tasks and hers. I drank the Kool Aid and joined the cult of Dave Allen.

I won’t go into GTD in too much detail here, but suffice to say that if you’re like me and have 50 projects floating around your head at once, it’s a great method for getting everything out of your head and into an easily-manageable list. The advantage is that you don’t find yourself anxiously plate-spinning. You just work your way through the list of actionable tasks. Works great. Go buy the book. ‘Nuff said.

So, I had the following requirements for a tool:

• It had to support GTD.
• I needed a way to administer tasks for other people working remotely.
• I wanted to synchronise it between different machines.
• It had to support email ‘dropbox’ functionality, because an awful lot of my tasks arrive by email and I want to get them out of my inbox and into something more structured.

Evernote isn’t billed as a GTD product, but it’s flexible enough that you can bend it to suit your needs. I use its tagging system to label notes as tasks. I use the @Danny and @Kim tags to define who a task is for. Then I’ll use contexts like ‘@Computer’, ‘@Contact’, ‘@Post’ (for physically mailing stuff out), and so on. Most of my work is done at the computer, and I like to keep contexts simple, so I don’t go crazy with the number of different tags to use.

A lot of my work is project-based, and those projects are generally news and feature articles. I write features, and I also edit a couple of newsletters, so each newsletter feature that I’m commissioning and editing is also a project. Evernote has a ‘notebook’ system that lets you create separate notebooks for different projects. I use a naming system to make it clear what a project is. If it has an ‘F:’ in front of it, then it’s a feature that I’m writing. If it has a ‘P:’ then it’s in the pipeline - it’s a potential article that I might decide to pitch to an editor when I’ve done enough research (which is really handy for investigative stories that you’re trying to work up into a solid article). The newsletter features have ‘ELS: F:’ or ‘ELS: P:’ to signify that it’s for my newsletter publisher (Elsevier) and that it’s either a commissioned article, or a project in the pipeline that I’m currently negotiating with a writer on.

So, let’s see how this works in practice.

I get a new commission from an editor. It’s a piece about data-centric security for a security title that I write for. I create a new notebook for that project:

Then I create a note in that notebook listing the project details:

In addition to being a record of the brief that I can refer back to, this is also a task for Kim. Notice how I use the @Kim and @Article tags so that she knows this job is for her, and that it’s an article to process. Just as she can select the @Kim tag in the sidebar to find all of the tasks she has to work on, she can also narrow that down to find all the articles I’m currently working on by selecting the @Article tag:

In addition to the article brief, there would normally be other data in this listing, such as the wordcount, deadline, and the amount I’ll be paid for the job, but for this example, I didn’t put that in (you don’t need to see that). But Kim does, because when a note has the @Article tag, Kim does three things with it. Firstly, she lists the job on an internet-based spreadsheet system that we use to keep track of my earnings, etc. Secondly, she posts the article on a features list blog that I maintain for PR people who want to know what I’m working on. Thirdly, she schedules the feature’s deadline date as an all-day event on Apple’s Mobile Me system. Mobile Me suffered from a lot of synchronisation problems when it first started out, but it seems to talk to my iPhone and Mac properly at this point. So now, I know at the start of each week what articles are due just by glancing at the phone.

Now, I need some interviews arranged. I create a separate note for each company that I want to interview for the article. If I know the PR person or spokesperson directly, I’ll list their contact details for Kim. But sometimes all she gets is a web address for a company that looks interesting, or perhaps even an online news story with instructions to track down someone mentioned there and arrange an interview. In this case, I want to speak with Symantec, and she’s dealt with them before. So I create a new note in the notebook with an ‘@Interview’ tag. Again, that makes it easier for her to find all of the interviews that she’s currently arranging. Other than that, this note says very little:

Then, I sync all this up to the online site using the blue button in the top left hand corner of the window, and the next time Kim syncs, she’ll see it all in her own Evernote client and can begin working on it. The only minor problem with syncing is that you can end up with conflicting changes, but if I Skype her before I sync, to check that she recently synced her own client, we’re good to go. Otherwise, I might have to move the odd task out of a ‘conflicting changes’ folder that Evernote will create. No biggie.

Kim then sends an email to the PR team for each interviewee that I want to approach, explaining who I am and what I’m doing, along with an article brief, deadline information, and background on me. This (usually) gives the PR folks everything they need to get working on something. She can also add her own notes to the relevant tasks in red, and change tags to ‘@Pending’, ‘@Done’ or whatever’s relevant, syncing it back up to the central site so that the next time I sync, I’ll see the current status:

While she does all that, it leaves me with more time to research the subject matter, find other potential contacts, and so on. Any relevant research that I find can also be dropped into the relevant notebook for the feature in Evernote:

and documents that I want to keep after a project is finished can be dragged into the ‘Reference notebook’, which acts like a long-term archive. Evernote lets me do a full text search, so documents like this become easily retrievable.

Evernote’s email dropbox system is also handy for incoming pitches. PR folks who see forthcoming articles listed on the blog will often mail me asking if I’d like to speak to their representatives. Peter has emailed me offering a chat with his client. Sounds good. So while replying to Peter, I forward it via BCC to a special email address provided as part of my Evernote account that I’ve listed with the name ‘In’ in my address book, for easy access. I set that drop box to deliver to the ‘in’ notebook, which is where all mails sent to Evernote initially land:

After I sync Evernote to get the mail into my local client as a note, I drag that mail from the ‘In’ notebook to the “F: Data-centric security” notebook, and use the tags to tell Kim that it’s a potential interview. Next time she logs in, she’ll mail Peter to follow up and arrange the call.

Kim isn’t going to arrange all my calls. There are some investigative stories that I’ll work on where that isn’t appropriate. But for a lot of the trade magazine features-type work, this arrangement can work very well. And if a task is for me rather than her, whether it’s calling a sensitive contact, or just painting the steps of the house, I can handle that in this system, too by creating a list of next action tasks for myself.

My contact Tammi has mailed me telling me that a service I use has been updated, and that I need to update a widget on my web site to use the latest version. So, I mail it to Evernote:

When it shows up there, I will move it to the relevant notebook. All tasks that aren’t part of a project get moved to the ‘Misc’ notebook. If it’s a task that’s part of a project, then I’ll move it to that project notebook instead. I also mark it with the ‘@Danny’ tag to show that it’s a task for me, and in this case, I add a ‘@Computer’ tag to show me that I can do it while I’m at my machine, and a ‘@Next’ tag, telling me that I can do it straight away (it’s an immediate action, and I don’t need to do any other stuff first).

I’m also trying to remember to use time-based tags, based on my estimate of how long that task will take. I don’t think this’ll take longer than half an hour, so I mark it with the ‘@<30m’ tag:

It’s important to handle everything coming across your desk this way. If it’s a paper-based document, scan it and copy it to Evernote. If it’s a Word doc, then print it as a PDF and upload it (Evernote doesn’t consistently seem to accept Office docs in their native format, which is a major failing at the moment, and one I hope they’ll fix soon). If I handle everything coming across my desk in the same way, then I can be confident that when I select the ‘@Danny’ and ‘@Next’ tags from the sidebar, I’ll see all the immediate tasks that I can currently be working on, rather than have to flounder around figuring out what I could be doing. I can get in ‘the zone’ and focus on working my way through the list:

Remember the ‘@<30m’ tag that I put on Tammi’s mail to let me know that this is a task that won’t take longer than half an hour? If I only have 30 minutes of downtime before a meeting, then I can select ‘@Danny’, ‘@Next’ and the ‘@<30m’ tag, to show all the appropriate tasks:

In general, all of this means that I’m getting better at responding to people and getting stuff done in a reasonable time. I’m still not perfect - I flake out occasionally like everyone else, and sometimes forget to review lists and clean up tasks that have been dealt with. Nevertheless, this tool and Kim are both helping me become more reliable, and more responsive, bit by bit.

Danny Bradbury
ITJOURNALIST.COM