In Evernote Free, Personal, and Premium, all notes live in a notebook. Here are the relevant Evernote constraints to understand that impact your GTD organization: NOTE CONSTRAINTS: When you understand the constraints of a tool (they all have them – even Evernote), you can design workflows that succeed within those constraints. Then, learn the software and move forward organizing within the boundaries of the software. So stop trying to find the perfect app – there isn’t one! Instead, do your research, and then pick a powerful and promising tool (Evernote). The GTD app that David sketched out in 1994 still doesn’t exist. This creates fewer swipes and taps over time. This is because you should be using note links in your note-based lists. And, you have less navigating to do on mobile if you want to drill down to related notes. You have access to more information on a single screen so you scroll less.

Screen utilization is more efficient on mobile too. And, if you use Evernote Tasks vs checkboxes to track your next actions in notes, you have a whole tasks view interface built specifically for efficiently viewing your tasks, no matter what note they live on.

Contrast this to a list based approach, you can see the full next action without further navigation. If you have a long note title (next action), you need to click on the note to read the entire next action. Screen utilization is better: The middle column of Evernote desktop is narrow. When you use a notebook based approach to organizing, both the note title and note body are in play. With a tag based approach to list management, all of the notes that are simple “next-actions” only use the note title field.

Note utilization is better: Notes have two “fields”: a note title, and a note body. You use fewer notes: If you don’t have to create a note for each and every next action, you will have fewer notes.

When compared, the two approaches to list making begin to illustrate what I call an “efficiency advantage” to a notebook based organizational approach for GTD in Evernote. In this example, you see, using the checkbox feature how:Ģ: Checkboxes are used to indicate open/completed itemsģ: Note links are used to provide navigation to supporting information/notesĪlthough both approaches successfully generate lists, each approach is fundamentally different. When you use notebooks to organize your data in Evernote, lists are created on notes - either by using the checkbox feature, or Evernote’s Tasks feature.

Evernote desktop notebooks organizatin