At any given point in time, my mind is awash with hundreds of ideas around Filament tech strategy, a cool app I’d like to build, ways to measure scientific impact, wondering what the name of that new song I heard on the radio was or some combination thereof.
To be effective at my job (and to stay sane in general), I really have to stay on top of what I know and how I manage my knowledge. My brain just doesn’t have enough room for everything I need to know and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m one of those stereotypical absent minded academic types, like
Harry Hill’s portrayal of Professor BraneStawm. That’s why I spend so much time trying trying to perfect the art of building a “second brain”.
There are so many different ways I could be keeping my notes but they all have their flaws. That’s why I keep coming back to Evernote. It is certainly not amazing, it just happens to be the best of a bad lot. Here are some strategies I’ve tried and why they failed.
Approach 1: Keeping paper notebooks
I love stationary. There’s nothing quite like writing your name on the front page of a brand new moleskin notebook. I accumulate notebooks like some kind of eccentric collector. Last count I had something like 28 of them under my desk. The sad thing is that most of them are at about 25% usage if that. I am well aware of how wasteful that sounds because it is wasteful and I am kind of ashamed. Here’s the key problem though. Physical paper notebooks are easy to forget.
Downside 1: Forgetting your notebook
As I said above, I’m a real stereotype absent minded professor type. As my girlfriend often tells me, and my parents many years before her, I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on. Its a miracle I leave the house fully dressed with my wallet and my mobile phone. A miracle or years of conditioning and last minute “pat checks” anyway.
Joking aside, I am pretty well organised most of the time but every time I go through a physical notebook phase I really struggle to get into a routine of remembering to put my notebook in my bag on the way out of the door.
Downside 2: Practicality
If I am able to remember to bring it, it doesn’t take me long to run into obstacle number 2 to notebook adoption: practicality. I spent a great deal of times on busy London commuter trains. Extracting your notebook and pen from your satchel and having enough room to move your arms around when you’re packed like a sardine on the 8.05 to Waterloo is particularly difficult and even on the miraculous occasion when get a seat, there usually isn’t room to swing an amoeba, nevermind a cat.
Downside 3: Organising and Searching
Assuming I remember it and I have room to open it and read it, the next problem with a physical notebook is finding information in it. Given my two jobs and my general curiosity, I am always making notes, having ideas and context switching. If I carry only one physical notebook then organising things by idea or context becomes very difficult. I’ve tried a couple of approaches here: carrying a wedge of coloured sticky notes and sticking a different one to my notebook each time I context switch seems like a great idea until you realise it makes things even less practical and there are only so many colours. I also tried carrying different notebooks for different projects or even just 2: one for Filament and one for my PhD. Again this is not overly practical and if I can’t remember one, remembering 2 is even less likely.
Downside 4: Security and Backup
The last big flaw with paper is that it is easy to lose or steal and once its gone its gone. Say what you will about people snooping and hacking on the internet, at least I can’t leave “the cloud” on a train or in a restaurant. Again, thanks to years of conditioning, I am much less prone to leave big ticket items like mobile phones and laptops lying around in public places but even if I did, my devices are encrypted, password protected and enabled for remote wipe (assuming enough battery life and connectivity). You just can’t remote wipe a slither of tree.
Approach 2: Personal Wiki
While I was at Uni, a friend of mine started keeping a personal wiki which was locked down and only readable to them. I thought that was a great idea. An online notebook, accessible from anywhere. I’ve been keeping a personal wiki for years (off and on) using
DokuWiki and I highly rate the software as wikis come. However, there are a couple of reasons I struggle with personal wiki maintenance.
Downside 1: Connectivity
One of the biggest problems with the personal wiki approach is offline access. The trains I typically catch don’t have great wifi and even when I can get online, it is often very slow or patchy and unreliable. I have tried my hand at hosting dokuwiki on my laptop and using the
XML-RPC sync plugin to mirror everything to my personal web server but the plugin (while amazingly and lovingly maintained by volunteers whose time I am incredibly grateful for) is not particularly reliable and I have sometimes lost notes using this process. I also can’t run a full LAMP stack on my phone which brings me to my next point…
Downside 2: Mobile Usability
When I’m crammed into a sardine tin or just want to make a quick 30 second note, the last thing I want to be doing is booting up my laptop to edit my personal wiki. Yes, I know I can edit my wiki from Chrome for Android and I have done on numerous occasions. However, I just don’t find the experience to be particularly pleasant or even practical. What dokuwiki et al are missing is a really good mobile app for making quick adjustments to content and ideally syncing sections of the wiki offline for reference on the go.
Downside 3: Dashboard or “making wikis sticky”
When I’m trying to build a new habit, what I really need is for whatever the tool I am trying to get used to to be in my face as much as possible. That’s one of the reasons dokuwiki on its own just isn’t sticky. Evernote is in your face on your desktop and phone and offers notifications. Physical notebooks are in your phase because they are physical books (if you remember to take them with you). Remembering to log into dokuwiki and read your todos is a bit like remembering to take your notebook in your bag. If its not muscle memory, it just doesn’t stick.
Approach 3: Markdown Notes
Similarly to dokuwiki, I’ve been evangelised by techie friends who use markdown notes and dropbox or owncloud a few times. Its a great idea in principle – using open source markdown <-> html <-> pdf programs like
pandoc to make my notes readable. Unfortunately markdown notes share a number of shortcomings with physical notebooks and personal wikis.
You’ll see from my below notes that my main gripe with this workflow is that it requires me to configure lots of different moving parts and write bespoke tools where existing open (or even paid) ones don’t do what I need.
Downside 1: Usability
Ok so I’m a geek and arguably I should just feel happy writing and maintaining my notes from the command line. The problem for me is that its not tremendously usable or “in your face” as I touched on above. I mean sure I love command lines as much as the next Linux power user, I do most of my development in vim and most of my source code management using git cli (as opposed to the GUIs that you can get for Eclipse and Atom etc). Personal knowledge management is one of the few places where I’d much rather just have an all in one tool that does everything I need and well than have to faff about with loads of moving parts and utilities. A few of cases where this is particularly poignant:
- Searching for notes in evernote or dokuwiki is as easy as typing into a search box and hitting enter. Searching for notes in markdown requires me to read the grep man pages for the umpteenth time because I’ve forgotten which flag to set to turn on or off regex in the particular flavour I need.
- Inserting images into markdown notes is a pain because I need to download the image, place it in a folder relatively near to my content and add an image markup section to my code. My assets tend to get very fragmented in this case too because I might use the same image in multiple notes and end up storing multiple copies of it in different “assets” folders. There is a really good atom plugin for this that allows you to “paste” images in your clipboard buffer into your notes and will automatically save it to disk and generate a link. That one plugin, as good as it is, doesn’t solve all my other gripes though.
- Rendering my markdown is a pain – the Atom plugins for this are not perfect and due to different flavours of markdown and rendering engines, I can render the notes in one tool and find that they render completely different in another. The best combo I’ve found so far has been Atom + Pandoc Markdown Plugin + Pandoc.
Downside 2: Mobile Usability
Exactly the same problem as with personal wikis. There are no good apps for a holistic markdown-notes-based workflow for Android. Sure there are a few good markdown editors and the best one I’ve found is
Epsilon notes. However, I need something that has a widget for my home screen and notifications and lights and bells and whistles to keep my absent minded academic brain on track. Epsilon is great if you remember to open it and check it (anyone else see a theme here?) but suffers from some of the same usability issues that desktop markdown editors do (inserting images etc).It is still great though, if you’re looking for a markdown editor for android and don’t have crazy demands like me, check them out!
Major Common Downside: Web Clipper (or lack thereof)
All of the approaches I’ve listed above are great in different ways and each has its own drawbacks but one thing that they are all missing is a good Web Clipper. A web clipper is typically a browser plugin or bookmarklet that allows you to save a web page’s content offline for reading later. Think of it like bookmarking on steroids. I suppose the real world simile would be instead of putting a bookmark in Game of Thrones when you put it down to go and have a cup of tea, you photocopy the whole chapter in case someone steals your copy of the book. This is super useful for me as I travel on the train a lot with no wifi but offers other amazing advantages too. For example, I can annotate/highlight and comment on content in the page directly and if the author of the original page takes their content down or forgets to pay their hosting bill, I can still read it.
Evernote are by no means the only people on the market with one of these babies. There are a few standalone tools that do this too and Microsoft’s impressive-but-lets-be-honest-less-usable-and-more-clunky Evernote competitor,
OneNote has a web clipper too. The web clipper is an absolutely crucial part of my workflow and I’ve never found a replacement for Evernote’s implementation that is quite as good. Honestly, I could probably live without and overlook some of the other things I moaned about earlier in this post but web clipper really is the be-all-and-end-all feature that I am looking for in a knowledge management suite.
Downsides of Evernote
As I said at the beginning, I am not an evernote ‘fan boy’ and this is supposed to be a fair and representative posting. Therefore let’s talk about Evernote’s warts.
Downside 1: Pricing Model
Look, I’m a professional, I know how much time and effort people put into software development and I am happy to pay for high quality products if they offer a genuine advantage to me. That’s why I think that for £30 a year for the ‘Plus’ option, Evernote is a steal. What I don’t like is the idea of artificially turning off some of the features just so that I drop another £20 for their ‘Premium’ tier. 1GB of storage per month? Fine! I only need that. 99% of the time I don’t need to scan business cards and to be perfectly honest, I can live without indexing text in pdfs too. However, those are all “nice to have” things that I’m not going to drop £20 for. I actually prefer Microsoft’s OneNote pricing model over Evernote’s. They don’t charge for the tooling, they charge for the disk space you’re using.
Downside 2: No Math Markup
As a machine learning specialist, I spend a lot of time reading and writing mathematical formulae. Therefore it kind of sucks that Evernote still doesn’t have any support for math. I can write math in my paper notebooks (or anything else for that matter) and I can use
MathJax in dokuwiki and LaTeX math syntax in markdown. I mean jeez, even OneNote has math formulae. If Evernote had maths markup I think it’d be pretty difficult to get me to leave their platform.
Downside 3: The Cloud is just someone else’s computer
Perhaps one of the biggest drawbacks of Evernote (and OneNote) is that they both require you to trust that they are not doing naughty things with your data and I don’t. Call me what you will: conspiracy theorist, foil hat wearer – I can take it, I was chubby, spotty and wore thick glasses at high school, I can take it. However, the point still stands that if you are putting data in someone else’s “black box” then you either have to take their promises at face value or just assume that they can see everything you are sending.
Evernote make all the right noises about securing your data against attackers and hackers and that’s good news but as a “tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist” I would rather just keep all my private data in my own private network. I would much rather pay a monthly license cost to run Evernote’s server stack software on my own hardware (yes I know running software compiled by someone else is scary but its still less scary than trusting them blindly with my data and I could always
wireshark the machine its running on and see if its sending any mysterious packets back to the mothership).
So why *do* I keep going back?
Despite all its flaws and warts, in terms of pricing, features and security, Evernote keeps enticing me back because:
- The user experience is great. The desktop app is clear and well designed, it works well and it does notifications and “in your face-ness” really well.
- It doesn’t let me forget it – kind of the same point as 1. but specifically Evernote stays front of mind and in a mind like mine, that’s a real feat.
- Mobile integration is really good and the Evernote android app is fantastic.
- The web clipper is so great on both desktop and mobile. I can glance at websites and “download” them for later then I can read them when I’m not busy – signal or not.
- While the pricing tiers are obnoxious, the Plus plan isn’t unreasonable given how much I spend on coffee.
What would entice me away?
If the open source community rallied around dokuwiki or markdown to create a high quality web scraper and a decent mobile app I would SO be there. Or if ownCloud/NextCloud notes was a bit more mature and had these features.
Concluding thoughts
Evernote is by no means perfect and I have deep concerns about my personal data when I use it. However, it seems to be the best option for keeping me organised on a practical day-to-day level and that’s why I keep going back. Here’s hoping that we get some good open source alternatives in this space sooner rather than later. If anyone has any suggestions for alternatives I could try, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section.
James Ravenscroft
Quality assurance is arguably one of the most important parts of the software development lifecycle. In order to release a product that is production ready, it must be put under, and pass, a number of tests – these include unit testing, boundary testing, stress testing and other practices that many software testers are no doubt familiar with. The ways in which traditional software are relatively clear.In a normal system, developers write deterministic functions, that is – if you put an input parameter in, unless there is a bug, you will always get the same output back. This principal makes it.. well not easy… but less difficult to write good test scripts and know that there is a bug or regression in your system if these scripts get a different answer back than usual.