I use an @inbox to drop new content into Evernote, but then process it on a daily basis into other notebooks.

When I first started using Evernote, I didn’t really think too hard about how I was going to use notebooks. Was I going to have a single notebook? Multiple? Work notebooks and personal notebooks?  I didn’t know.  I had no idea and didn’t even give it a second thought.

Then before I knew it, I started looking at my notebook list with some major guilt. There was no system at all and my left-brain hated it.  My default notebook, which at the time was simply called “kenclark’s notebook,”  was a grab bag for everything. That might have been an appropriate strategy if it was the only notebook (because I could then just treat it as an archive and rely on tags and searching to find items), but of course I had a couple of other random notebooks so there was no real strategy there.

Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t even thought of Evernote from the perspective of GTD.  While the beauty and strength of Evernote is that you can clip, capture and send all sorts of items to it from any number of platforms, the content builds up very fast and to use a GTD term is “unprocessed”.

My “a-ha” was that the default notebook was really just another inbox that had to be processed as opposed to a one-size-fits-all archive of my stuff. I know it sounds ridiculous, but once I changed the name of my default notebook to “@inbox”, I began to process it daily and move content into other notebooks using basic GTD concepts.  I tell you it was a minor thing, but it worked great and I have never looked back.

If you’re a GTD’r or are looking for a notebook methodology, give it a try.

During my recent foray into rediscovering Evernote, I experimented with Evernote’s Applescript dictionary and Snow Leopard’s updated Services architecture.  My goal was to write a service that made capturing data into Evernote even easier.

I was pretty excited to see how easy it was to write a service and created one that directly import files from the Finder into Evernote.

Here’s how to set it up:

1) Launch Automator and select “Service”

The Service template in Automator is new to Snow Leopard and lets you create services from scratch.

2) Change “Service receives selected” to “files and folders”.  Leave “any application” selected and “replaces selected text” unchecked.

The new Services template can handle a number of data types, but for us files or folders is what we want.

3) Pick the “Run Applescript” action from the Utilities Library and copy and paste the below applescript into the input box.

This script has error handling built in (that’s the try… end try statement), so if you pass something that Evernote can’t handle, you will get an alert box telling you what is wrong.  The most common error you may see is if you try to pass the service an unsupported file type.  For example, if you are not an Evernote Premium user and try to pass it a Word doc you will get an error, or if you try to pass it a folder, you will get an error.

The script supports passing multiple files (and if one of the files creates an error condition it will only fail that import, not the entire batch).

on run {input}
     tell application "Evernote"
          repeat with x in input
               try
                    create note from file x
               on error error_message number error_number
                    display alert "Send to Evernote Failed" message "Error:     " & error_message & "
" & "Error Number:  " & error_number as warning
               end try
          end repeat
     end tell
end run

When you are done in Automator, it will look like this:

That’s it!

4) Go to File > Save As and name the service “File | Import to Evernote”

This saves the service so it is available throughout OS X.

5) Set a Keyboard Shorcut via Automator > Services > Services Preferences

This is not required, but if you want to create a keyboard shortcut, just find the “File | Import to Evernote” Service and double-click the keyboard shortcut column.  I assigned shift-command-E, but you can do whatever makes sense for you.

6) Try it out!

Now when you are in the Finder, you can click your keyboard shortcut and/or right click and pick the service from the context-menu and import files direct into Evernote.

Last Tip:  If you have Growl installed and have it configured for Evernote, you will get a Growl notification once the import is successful.  It puts a nice finishing touch to the service.

I sure felt like I was reading a lot about information organizers or “anything / everything bucket” software over the last week.  First, Bare Bones Software released Yojimbo 2.0.  Shortly thereafter I read about a new version of Notational Velocity and a press release that Chronos was updating SOHO Notes with iPhone support.  Before I knew it, I was googling for every article on how these apps compared to Evernote — the king of the hill as far as I was concerned.

These apps are not new — most in the category have been around for a couple years and their proponents and critics are abound.  Evernote has been installed on my Mac for some time, but unfortunately had been reasonably dormant for the last few months.  I decided to re-look how to better use Evernote as well as take a fresh look at Yojimbo.

If my only consideration was using a Mac desktop client app, I probably would have picked Yojimbo.  I find the user interface cleaner than Evernote’s, and I really like Yojimbo’s Drop Dock and quick entry panel.  I also much prefer how it exports files over Evernote (Yojimbo allows you to export all documents directly to their native formats while Evernote supports HTML and a custom XML export).

However, at the end of the day Evernote won out for me.  The desktop client is close enough to matching what I like in Yojimbo yet it wins the day with its platform neutrality and one kick-ass iPhone app.  It really does transform your iPhone into the ultimate capture tool, and it is Evernote’s killer feature.  Case in point:  I was in Costco this weekend and saw a book I thought I might want to read.  I took a picture of the book in Evernote and it instantly uploaded to my Evernote library so I have it for reference the next time I am looking for something to read.  Very cool.

During the process of testing out both of these apps, it sparked a number of ideas I thought would be good to share here, so you can expect a couple posts on my experiences in the upcoming weeks.  If you’ve never used either Evernote or Yojimbo you should definitely give them a try.

P.S.:  Here’s Evernote Tip #1: Use its note editor to capture ideas for blog posts -  this post started as a one line note in Evernote.  I went back to it and it turned into a blog post.  That’s the first time I’ve used Evernote in that way.