🔗 I wrote something up about leaving Evernote. Let me know what you think and if you have questions. Happy to answer them.
@bradbarrish Good write up! I went through this earlier this year. A couple of differences. First I imported the notes with PDFs from Evernote to Notes. This turned out to be a mistake and I don’t recommend it. Notes totally bogged down and never recovered (even after days). So I moved the PDFs from Notes to folders in Documents and that has worked very well. The other is I don’t have a dedicated scanner since I rarely need to scan multi-page documents. I just use my Epson printer (which does great quality scans).
@ronguest Even if they're all one page, if you have the scan a lot of documents, the ScanSnap is a revelation. It just mows through them. ⏱ //@bradbarrish
@Bruce I always like more toys but I only need to scan a few pages a week. I am paperless but almost everything arrives electronically so no conversion is needed.
@bradbarrish I should probably add that as part of my move away from Evernote I bought Keyboard Maestro to help automate collection, naming and filing of PDFs (among other things). I use Shortcuts on iOS to help (but it’s no KM!).
@Bruce If you’re a heavy Scansnap user, be sure you know how to clean and replace those feed rollers. It will save you grief and frustration.
@bradbarrish Like @ronguest, I made my move away earlier this year, ahead of an expiring subscription. I settled on an arrangement similar to yours (Dropbox/Bear). My major note repository is my digital recipe book, compiled from all kinds of sources & extensively tagged. I’m wondering: did you consider Devonthink? I’m interested, but the price of entry is pretty high for that kind of plunge.
@schuth I’m too fussy about design and UX to even consider Devonthink. It’s probably totally overkill and isn’t cross-platform the way Google Drive (or Dropbox) and Bear are.
@ronguest I use Hazel a bit for that and plan to get even deeper with it now that I’m done with The Great Evernote Migration.
@schuth I like and use Bear. But I often think of just switching to iaWriter and a folder on a cloud drive. 🤷🏼♂️
I am probably going to start using DevonThink within the year to organize my unruly slew of PDFs. It seems ideal for that kind of job.
@grayareas DevonThink will slurp up plain text notes too and understands markdown. It's not the greatest interface for writing them, but really flexible with organizing them and finding connections between them and everything else you've thrown in. Really powerful search.
@bradbarrish I had a hard time deciding between Hazel or KM. I think for this purpose Hazel is the best choice but for the money KM was more multi-purpose for me. The weak point in this workflow is, unlike Evernote, it is completely different on iOS from MacOS (I mostly use iOS). Anyway, I imagine people would be interested in a post describing your use of Hazel.
@ronguest I still predominantly use a desktop for work, but have an iPad Pro that I use a lot as well. I’ve never tried KM, but a lot of people seem to love it. When I get the Hazel workflow dialed in, I’ll write something up for sure.
@bradbarrish I just got a chance to read your post about quitting Evernote. I did the same several years ago, switching to plain text files (usually Markdown) in Dropbox as much as possible, and then using other tools to make stuff from those when and if needed. My workflow starts with nvAlt, BBEdit, 1Writer, or Ulysses depending on the device I'm on and the length of the note, then might go into OmniOutliner or Marked depending on what I'm making.
Inbound stuff gets scanned into other Drobox folders instead of a filing cabinet. I could probably make better use of Hazel or Keyboard Maestro for automatic filing, but never found a good way to pull the relevant info. It's infrequent enough that I just do it the long way when I need to.
Glad you shared. It's not something I've thought about much in a long time.
@jalvani I know there are a bunch of people that have done it or are thinking about doing it. It's the kind of write-up that I would like to see from people more often. I'm trying to document my processes more. Thanks for reading!