Evernote and I have a long running relationship. I’ve stored pdfs, images, articles, bookmarks and anything else it accepted. However, over time it’s become my Macbook’s junk drawer. If I don’t where to put something, I just throw it into Evernote.
The issue for me has become that Evernote doesn’t seem to do any one thing really well, instead it does a whole lot things okay. Its reminders feature is a bit cumbersome, you can handwrite notes in iOS if you use their Penultimate app, and you can export out your notes in their unique enex format. These are just a few examples of things that Evernote does, but not well enough to be the best in class in terms of note-taking.
At the same time Evernote announced and then rescinded a plan to let engineers read your notes in order to help them build a better product. Now I don’t have anything in Evernote that I would deem extremely private, but the thought of Evernote looking over my shoulder isn’t very comforting.
So it’s time for me to “konmari” my note taking system and figure out what works best for me and brings me joy when I use it. So for me it’s Apple Notes. Now granted it doesn’t have tagging, OCR, a web clipper or the ability to talk to IFTTT. However, I find those limitations actually freeing.
The limitations force me to focus on using the app for its intended purpose.. to take notes. If I want a place to store pdfs I can do that in Google Drive. If I need to store articles somewhere I can use Instapaper. Both of them are far superior to Apple Notes or Evernote in those tasks.
Now there are some work-arounds I’m trying utilize. For one, you can’t email notes to Apple Notes. So for now I’m using Airmail and its actions feature to send emails to Apple Notes.
I’m over two weeks into my move and I’m immediately seeing some benefits. First, Apple Notes loads extremely fast. Second, its stripped down interface makes it easier to get straight to work.
Of course, there’s also that added benefit of not having to pay $70 a year.