I can't has cheezburger

If you started using Evernote, it probably didn’t take long for you to feel like Evernote’s starting to cramp your style. You can only be so creative if your tools are basically what you can make with a rich text editor.  To make matters worse, Evernote has remarkably little interest in adding new, more flexible tools to what you can do with the note editor.

But it’s hard to fault Evernote for that. If you wanted to add a single new feature to the note editor as Evernote, you’d have to figure out how to represent it in Evernote’s HTML-like format. You’d have to develop tools in the native Evernote apps (which there are quite a few of), and every time you launch this new tool on one of the platforms, some asshole (usually I’m this asshole) is tweeting you saying how worthless you are that you haven’t brought feature parity to all your platforms.

So with that challenge in mind, don’t expect much from Evernote on this front. But if you find yourself wanting Evernote to have diagramming, advanced drawing, or outlining tools, you might need to approach what Evernote is to you with a new perspective.

Evernote is rigid in what you can edit in its native editor, but beyond that, it’s incredibly flexible. You can attach files of any type to your Evernote notes (even free users can do this now). If you want them to be searchable from Evernote, send a PDF of the file to Evernote and you’re golden.  This gives you the best feature of Evernote: the universal accessibility of a variety of document types.

Don’t sit here waiting for Evernote to get a set of tools as good as OmniGraffle’s, or OmniOutliner’s.  Evernote can’t and shouldn’t try to emulate these apps.  Save your files as PDFs an apps, then send those PDFs to Evernote.  In iOS, Evernote is registered as an app that can open PDFs so you’re golden. And bug your app developers to add support for sending to Evernote (it isn’t that hard).  Ideally I’d like to see some notetaking apps (like Taposé) gain true Evernote integration in which I natively was touching Evernote notes when I was taking notes in the app, but that’s quite an undertaking (though it didn’t stop HTC from making such an app for one of their tablets).

To quote Merlin Mann, don’t fault your hammer for not being a ham sandwich.

Here’s the fun part in which we get into the meat of a paperless lifestyle.

You don’t have to use Evernote as your note & snippet repository. It’ll make this article less relevant, but there do exist some direct Evernote competitors. Springpad is a notable one. OneNote is great. Maybe Yojimbo is more your thing. DevonThink is quite respectable as well. Perhaps you prefer Circus Ponies NoteBook. Or, maybe you’re old school and you want to manage them all in files and folders manually.

I chose Evernote some time ago because it has a really good balance of all the things I need. It won’t let me scribble things super free form all over a note and record with a note and sync what I wrote to the recording (OneNote, Circus Ponies NoteBook do). It’s not really good at being a good example of a Mac app (Yojimbo is better at that). It doesn’t automatically parse my notes and present me relevant information for specific things inline (Springpad does).

But it does have a version available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (unofficial), web, WebOS, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, iOS and Android (there doesn’t exist another note-taking solution compatible with this many platforms). Not only is Evernote available for each of these platforms, Evernote is written totally natively for each platform, so it fits very well into your phone’s OS or computer’s OS. If you’ve ever used an app that was originally written for another platform and lazily ported over to yours, you’ll appreciate that extra effort. If you add content that is an image, Evernote will make the text in it searchable, even handwritten content (I think it’s the only one in my list that does that). It allows you to easily clip content from the web and it offers this through native extensions for the three major browsers (Firefox, Safari and Chrome) I use. And it’s designed to be very flexible, and doesn’t require you to manage files in any way. It’s synced to a web based account automatically (Springpad does this, but that’s because it has no native OS X client). Evernote treats your notes in a very abstract manner, letting you organize your snippets of information into notebooks and tags (each note lives in a single notebook and can have zero or more tags), and each note can have a number of attributes that help you have context for when you wrote your note. Much of it is implicit. If you write a note on your smartphone, your location is automatically embedded into the note. The date and time you created and last modified the note is right in there. If you clipped a note from the web, Evernote automatically includes the source URL in the note’s metadata, making research super easy. In short, Evernote is designed to make a plethora of information available to you wherever you may happen to be, and they are focused on making it super easy to get that information into it. This is totally in line with what I expect out of a system for enabling me to be paperless.

To get started, get Evernote installed on all of your devices which support it, and log in with your Evernote account. Start off with a free account and upgrade to a paid account when you need it. On your computers, install the Evernote browser extension on all web browsers you use.

Now, when do you use it? Here are a few ideas:

With the exception of the restaurant menu idea, you’ll notice that none of these things are necessarily making your more paperless than you were before, unless perhaps you put things like this on a lot of post-it notes. This is part of the habit forming experience. You want to reach a point where entering things into a computer or other device is the way you put information away to remember. When that becomes second nature to you, you’re well on your way to being paperless, and that habit is going to push you to start doing things proactively to get the paper out of your life (which I will write about later).

Evernote’s got a fair number of ways you can catalog and manage your information. If you are itching to use that functionality, go for it, but don’t push yourself to do this in a way that puts you at risk for falling out of the habit of using Evernote. Start using tags and extended note attributes only when you really feel the need for them. Otherwise, you could be forcing yourself to take more time to make Evernote notes than it otherwise would have taken you. That’s no good.

Next up I’ll be discussing some stylistic choices you have to make when using Evernote, and some of the ways you can use Evernote to keep all your notes within close reach.

“Why don’t you just wipe your ass with your iPad? –Allison Mitchell

Once you have the tools you wish to use to adopt a paperless life, it becomes time to start using the tools. This is by far the most difficult part of the process, because it requires making real, meaningful changes to how you organize your stuff and how you deal with information as you get it. More importantly, you have to change your instincts when you find that you are in need of some piece of information.

When you first start putting stuff into a digital repository, it’s hard to get into the habit of continuing to do it because you haven’t yet benefitted from having the information stored like this (since there’s not yet much information in your digital repository). However, once you do encounter that situation where you need something and you realize “oh, I have it right here in Evernote, let me just grab it!” it’s at that point that you are on track to be in the habit.

Let’s start with the easiest habit to change: saving your files into Dropbox. It’s straightforward enough to do. First, move your existing documents into Dropbox. If you have a Documents (OS X, Windows Vista and up) or a My Documents (Windows XP) folder, make one in your Dropbox, move the contents of your old Documents folder into it, and then start saving your stuff in the new Documents folder instead. If you are using OS X or Vista or Windows 7, it’s a good idea to remove the sidebar shortcut to the old Documents folder and replace it with the new one.

If putting these documents into Dropbox puts strain on the free space you’re allocated, just buy more Dropbox space (or switch to an .edu account and refer lots of people). Don’t ever put yourself into a situation where you have to decide what’s worth keeping in Dropbox, because you’ll inevitably some day be in an airport needing a document you never thought you’d need again. 50 gigabytes of Dropbox space can be had for as little as $100 a year, and unless you’re a video editor or someone whose job involves incredibly large files, it goes a long way.

Having your files Dropboxed gives you some peace of mind. For one thing, for each computer you have Dropbox installed on (if you’re doing it right that is all of them), you have a redundant local backup of all of your files that automatically propagates instantly. You can walk from one computer to another (like a BOSS) and pick up on documents right where you left off. Did a catastrophic storm happen, destroying one of your computers and leaving you without an internet connection? Fear not, the files are right there for you to use on your other machine.

What’s that? You accidentally deleted a file and now it’s deleted on all your computers because Dropbox propagates changes like that? No problem. Go to Dropbox’s web app, log in, and browse to your folder and click “Show Deleted Files.” Bam.

But what if you didn’t delete a file, but instead you drunkenly made some egregious modifications to one of your files? Not to worry. Dropbox has you covered there as well.

At a friend’s house and you didn’t bring a computer with you but you need a document? Again, no problem. Just log into the Dropbox web app and you can see all your files and download the one you want to work with it. You don’t have to worry about installing some software on your friend’s computer.

It gets cooler, though. Dropbox’s mobile app gives you handy access to all of your files. Sitting on a beach and your friend wants that PDF of the eBook you have a (perfectly legal) copy of? It’s surprisingly easy to email your friend a link to the file. And in situations where access to an important file is even more critical, you’ll appreciate having that safety net that much more.

Again, Dropbox isn’t exactly an integral part of a paperless life since those documents were already not on paper, but it’s a habit worth getting into.