Well, I’ve been a long-time user of Evernote, since it was in beta, but in the past six months, my use of it has really slowed down. I relied on it so heavily that my overall Evernote database was 24,000 notes large and the index it created on my Mac was almost 70 GB. I also had many templates and hacks to the way I made it work, but what really drove me away from relying on it more was the way it slowed down for me. The mobile app seemed almost unusable, waiting for it to work, even on newer Apple devices. Additionally, I ended up with some sync issues that never seemed to be able to resolve themselves.
As a consultant, I have lots of project docs that are corporately on Google Drive, but my own notes tend to be on my own tools, like Evernote. The biggest problem tends to come in when I have to work with my own docs, intermingled with project docs, that are organized the way a project manager wants them, which is not necessarily the way I work. The great thing with Evernote was that I could link notes together, but I found that with all my projects, I had to have an “Overview” note, which linked to all the other artifacts I’d need. It wasn’t just so easy as putting everything in one notebook.
I’ve now been tweaking my own systems between several alternative apps. I bought DevonThink, though I’m still struggling with getting it setup to work the way I might really want it to work (especially when it comes to understanding how to sync with mobile), though I’m sure some poking around this forum could lead me to some helpful hints to get going. I’m also using Agenda, which really ties nicely with my calendar and Markdown. I’ve also been trying to use Omni Outliner more, though the ability to share that which I create there with other platforms (with proper formatting) is also alluding me. When I’m onsite at a customer, I tend to use Drafts on my iPad to take notes, which I really need to spend some time building out more TextExpander snippets with templates. I also use Ulysses for some notes, but it can still be challenging to be a note-taking platform.
In the end, I downloaded all my Evernote contents in the ENEX format and I have them backed up, but then I went in and nuked almost 20,000 notes, just to get things down to a more reasonable performance on the app. I’ve wanted to bring all that into DevonThink, though as you read earlier, I’m still not at all Ninja on that app. Lastly, I used to be really keen on Evernote, having gone to their user conference twice, and even had Phil Libin, the CEO of the company make me a cappuccino when I was at their offices, but I have felt a lot less affinity towards Evernote since he and many of the other company executives have left. To me, it doesn’t have the shine and excitement it once had.
