Evernote for Mastering the GTD® Workflow

Here we’ll address the most powerful reason to use Evernote for GTD: You can manage your entire life from one app vs many. It’s simpler. It’s more cost effective. And, it’s more efficient.

REASON #3: EVERNOTE IS ONE TOOL (VS MANY)

When creating your trusted system outside your brain, you have a choice: build it with one app, or with a suite of apps.

To make a proper choice, you must first understand what the daily work of a GTD practice is.

Getting Things Done is organized into 3 parts. Part 2 – representing over 50% of the book – is titled “Practicing Stress-Free Productivity”. These chapters detail out the 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow, the core of your daily GTD practice and a core tenant of the book.

GTD THEME: THE FIVE STEPS OF MASTERING WORKFLOW

Getting Things Done defines these 5 steps as the methodology for mastering workflow and gaining control of your life:

The work of the reader is to craft their own system using tools of their choice to support working through this process.

Which sounds more efficient: Using 1 tool for all 5 of these steps? Or having multiple tools for these steps?

With Evernote, you can accomplish all 5 steps with a single app (I’ve done it every day, for years now).

Imagine: Just one tool to learn and only one subscription to pay. You’re saving time and money already.

And, Evernote’s features are brilliant in supporting a GTD practice. Let’s now look at each phase of the 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow and inspect exactly how Evernote supports the GTD practitioner in getting things done and achieving stress-free productivity.

First up: Capture.

EVERNOTE: THE ULTIMATE CAPTURE TOOL

Evernote is widely recognized as the top capture tool on the market and a key reason those who love Evernote really love Evernote.

Evernote enables users to easily and efficiently capture and centralize anything we come across day-to-day that we may want to take action on – either now or in the future – or keep for any reason.

Ideas, work, home projects, articles to read, travel…our brain finds “stuff” it wants to keep in so many places. And that’s a huge part of the value proposition of Evernote. Anytime my brain finds something worth retaining, no matter where I come across it – on the web, as a thought, in a document, through handwritten notes, an email – I capture it to Evernote, with an effortless tap or click, and at the speed of thought.

It works like this for me:

In addition to illustrating my workflow, this graphic highlights why you’re so overwhelmed and buried under the crushing weight of information descending on you. There’s A LOT coming at us.

And, without a solid grasp on how to capture it all, it’s easy to retreat from battle and let the “stuff” win. Next thing you know, sticky notes line your monitor, your email inbox has 200 (or 2,000) unread emails, receipts are busting out of the shoebox, your laptop desktop is a cluttered mess of icons, and you have to tell yourself 14 times to buy q-tips at Target.

But Evernote puts me in control. It doesn’t matter what context I’m in:

• If I’m sitting at my computer on a Zoom call – I take notes right in Evernote.

• If I’m driving to the gym and I have an idea pop into my head – I speak my ideas into note using Evernote audio capture.

• The hummus recipe I found online to test out on Saturday – the web clipper saves it in a click into Evernote.

• If I’m surfing the web and I find a blog I want to read later – I just clip it to Evernote.

• If the school sends me a PDF of the soccer schedule via email, I forward the email into Evernote – both the email and attachment are there when I need them.

• If I respond to an email and want to save it, I bcc my Evernote account and it suddenly appears.

• When I attend a conference, I record the presenter by recording an audio note in Evernote and I scan the business cards of those I met right to Evernote – and the contact info is automatically extracted and saved to my contacts. That’s next-level networking right there!

• The air filter at my house that I can never remember the size of when I’m at the store? I just share the photo from my camera roll directly to Evernote.

• The home warranty plan I need to access when the refrigerator goes haywire? I scan it to Evernote with my desktop scanner.

• Those sticky notes where I jot down the phone number of the vendor I need to contact – I take a picture with the Evernote camera on my phone and save it in Evernote.

All of these are examples of open loops that – in order to effectively practice GTD – need to be off of my mind and kept in my trusted system (not my brain). Evernote makes it easy.

Evernote really is the ultimate inbox.

And because all your “stuff” is now in a single spot – you’ve already captured a huge productivity advantage. Research shows that 20% of your week is spent searching for stuff. What a waste of time and precious brain energy!

By simply centralizing all your stuff in Evernote, you’re limiting the number of places you need to search. Imagine knowing that your car keys are only in 1 possible location. You’d save boatloads of time hunting for your keys.

And, since Evernote’s industry-leading capture is matched by industry-leading search (more on this later), you’ve set yourself up for hours of efficiency gains by simply centralizing your stuff and reducing the number of places you have to search for things.

You’re already way ahead of the game by simply using Evernote for capture - Step 1 of the 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow.

02: CLARIFY

Representing the middle column of the Mastering Workflow map, in the clarifying stage, you’ll do the work to get to the bottom of everything you’ve captured in your “in box”.

03: ORGANIZE

The work of the organize phase is to take each item you have captured and clarified, and move it from your inbox to a predefined spot in your system as represented by all the perimeter icons of the mastering workflow diagram.

It’s at the organize phase where some GTD practitioners start to balloon out of control by adding apps outside of Evernote to their trusted system.

They use Evernote for the capture phase (because it’s the best capture tool on the market), but they think they need a “task tracking” app and a “project management” app to manage their stuff.

This simply isn’t true. It can all be managed with Evernote. You just need to know how – and most don’t.

And before they know it, they have a web of apps that make up their trusted system. They are paying multiple subscriptions. They have to learn the details of multiple applications. One app releases an update and the integrations they had with other parts of their system break. Their data ends up fragmented across multiple apps. All because they didn’t understand how to properly structure and use Evernote to manage all phases of mastering workflow.

I’ll get to what these people are doing wrong in using Evernote for GTD later in this article, but first, let me explain why the organize step can be managed entirely within Evernote.

It’s thanks to reason #2 to use Evernote for GTD: Evernote is flexible.

As David Allen’s workflow diagram illustrates, different contexts of data are grouped into different containers: projects are different from items to be incubated, which are different from items that you are waiting for someone else on.

Each of these contexts represent different types of workflows, and different workflows should be organized in different types of ways.

Because Evernote’s lets you organize data any way you want, you can structure the management and tracking of data inside your account to each GTD context areas in a way that’s suited best to that area. So, you can mix and match organizational strategies all within one app.

Within my Evernote account, I have distinct sections that track and manage:

• What I capture

• Projects

• Processes

• Daily tasks

• Active project support material

• Next action lists

• Waiting for items

• Reference material

• Checklists

And within these sections I have the power to organize, cross reference, create associations between data, and more – all within one app. It the most efficient choice for managing a GTD process one can create.

Using outside apps to organize is unnecessary extra work. And, it complicates your GTD process and system.

Instead, organize in Evernote.

04: REFLECT

The next step of mastering workflow requires you to review everything that’s in your trusted system. By doing so at regular intervals you gain an understanding of how the current context of your life impacts your priorities.

GTD provides guidance on what to review when – ranging from daily tasks to long term goals. And the primary focus of the reflect step is about completing regular weekly reviews:

“Once a week, do a thorough review of all your projects in as much detail as you need to. If you do, your systems will work. If you don’t, no system will work.”  – David Allen

Centralization of your stuff in Evernote pays big dividends here. If you’ve captured, clarified, and organized your data in one tool, the process of reviewing is easy. No scanning and searching across multiple tools to gather a full understanding of what’s on your plate.

The weekly review is often thought of as the most challenging part of the GTD practice (learn why people struggle with it here). If you’ve practiced GTD for any amount of time though, you don’t need convincing. You know that anything you can do to simplify the weekly review process is an advantage. And centralization is simplification.

Centralize external data

Also, data doesn’t have to live in Evernote:

In another testament to the flexibility of Evernote – data doesn’t have to live in Evernote for you to centralize it in Evernote, facilitating an efficient review.

This may sound counter to my earlier advocacy of capturing it all to Evernote. But, stick with me. 

Even though Evernote has the capability to store digital data of any format, you might not always want to store something natively in Evernote. 

For example, not everyone uses the same tools as you. Say you’re collaborating on a project with someone who has shared a Google Drive folder with you and they don’t use Evernote. In this case, leave the documents on Google Drive, but grab the link to the documents (or folder) that live on Google Drive, and paste it into Evernote. Then, click on the link in Evernote. The document will open from Google Drive. 

You can use this strategy for any service that lets you grab a link to the documents that live there (as any cloud-based tool does).

Centralize Tasks in Evernote

The reflect step isn’t just about the weekly review. It’s also about your daily tasks. They’re one of the key items to frequently reflect on in your system. 

You should be asking yourself daily: Are my tasks still relevant given the current priorities and context of today? Am I working on the right things today?

“A few seconds a day is usually all you need for review, as long as you’re looking at a sufficient amount of the right things at the right time.” – David Allen

Most people do this poorly. Sure, each day they do a quick scan of their lists to ferret out what catches their eye in hope that they’ll have the satisfaction of crossing it off that day.

But usually, there’s too much on the task list. Your task list is simply overwhelming.

The answer: Manually create your daily task lists as part of your daily reflect habit – all inside Evernote.

This is easy to do if you have captured, clarified, and organized your stuff inside of Evernote. You just review what you’ve organized, and determine your daily priorities based on the availability and energy you have for that day. It takes just a few seconds each day.

This also presents the advantage that your tasks are kept in the same app as all the stuff you’ve captured in Evernote – the projects, notes, and other supporting materials that your tasks emerged from. Since these things are all related, it’s clearly most efficient to have them all in the same tool (and sets you up to do some cool stuff with note links).

Automation is fueling the task overwhelm fire. Just drop it. Get out of your “task management” app, and organize your daily to-do’s in Evernote. There’s checkboxes that you can tick off as you complete your tasks. Or you can use Evernote Tasks. And you can build the right workflow structure in Evernote to support task management. It’s manual. It’s easy. And, it works.

And, it’s how to use Evernote to reflect - the 4th step of mastering workflow.

05: ENGAGE

At this point, all that’s left to do is to engage – or simply do what you need to do. Go to your task lists and get started getting things done!

When Evernote is your sole GTD app, in the engage step, you use it as the master dashboard to your life. It’s your command center providing access to everything you need to make decisions on what to do next.

Evernote’s feature set continues to support in the engage phase in two ways: 

First: Evernote’s anytime, anywhere, any-device access ensures you can engage whenever you want. If you find 20 minutes to work at the car wash, pick up your phone and you can have access to your full GTD system – even if you’re offline. Be productive anytime you like — WiFi or not!

Second: The GTD methodology provides different models making the best action choices for yourself in the engage phase. So again, the flexibility of Evernote shines. When you understand it, you can use Evernote to organize, view and retrieve data in a way that supports the engage model you embrace.

Engage should be easy. If you struggle to “do”, the issue isn’t Evernote. Instead, it's a symptom that you need to sharpen your GTD practice – by strengthening one of your GTD success factors, or better executing a preceding step in the 5 Steps of Mastering Workflow.

You can now see that multiple apps aren’t necessary for GTD. Evernote’s powerful and flexible enough to support all 5 Stages of Mastering Workflow – the foundation of an effective GTD practice.

And by centralizing your GTD practice in Evernote, you minimize app subscription fees, simplify the apps you need to capture, organize, reference and search, and you set yourself up for an efficient GTD practice.

By selecting Evernote as your GTD app, you’ve fulfilled step #2 on the path to GTD success.

The next question to ask: How exactly should I use Evernote for GTD?

The flexibility of Evernote is a double-edged sword. It’s clearly a key reason to use Evernote for GTD, but it also opens the door for errors in organizing and managing a GTD practice inside Evernote.

To avoid these pitfalls, join me on the next page where I address what you’re doing wrong in using Evernote for GTD next.

Next: Part 2 – How You Go Wrong Using Evernote for GTD (Page 4 of 7)