Nontrivial Exercises

NoteFlags in EverNote

One of the most useful features of Microsoft OneNote is noteflags – the different types of tags (flags) that you can assign to individual paragraphs within any note. You can use these to note to-do’s, something important that you want to refer to later, an item you want to remember to discuss with your boss, etc. Then, you could view a list of all noteflags of a certain type, e.g. view all new actions you’ve noted, or all items you need to discuss with your boss. For each item, you can check off actions that you’ve completed (or recorded in another action tracking system, like Outlook).

OneNote allows you to define and customize up to 25 different flags. This was one of my favorite features in OneNote and one which I utilized prolifically in my initial use of OneNote.

As I switched to EverNote, one of the biggest drawbacks was the lack of the equivalent noteflag functionality. I really wanted to at least be able to flag three types of information in my notes:

·        Actions that I need to take

·        Actions that others are taking that they will deliver to me

·        Generally important pieces of information

I have developed a basic system of note taking over the past few years whereby I essentially track the above three items. This is easy to do with a paper notebook, but more difficult to do effectively with software. The ability to track at least these three things is a requirement for me, though, in any note taking system I will use.

As an aside, for a great overview on note taking – principles and ideas for taking effective notes – see a recent entry in Michael Hyatt’s Working Smart blog.

Now, I’ve found a workaround in EverNote to implement what essentially are noteflags. It’s a very simple implementation of one of the simple yet powerful features in EverNote – the category lists. You can define categories and sub-categories in any manner, and then manually assign one or more categories to notes. You can also define a category that will automatically be assigned to notes that meet a certain criteria – an “auto category”.

Here is an example of the different criteria you can use to define an “auto category”:

Now, to implement my workaround, first, I come up with a short text keyword for each item: I use “A::” for an action, “W::” for items for which I’m waiting for from others, and “*::” for important items.

Next, I simply create three auto categories, one for each of the three types of flags I want to track. I define the auto categories by editing the Advanced options and using the “Automatically assign this category to all notes that contain the following keywords” section, and then I enter the appropriate keyword for each of the three items.

For example, here is how my Action category definition looks:

One special note: EverNote does employ simple regular expressions, i.e. certain wildcards. The star (“*”) is a multiple-character wildcard, so to define my Important category, I have to use quotes to keep EverNote from treating it as a wildcard character. Here is my Important category definition:

Then, to use the flag in a note, I simply type the keyword before the relevant text. I can then simply select the relevant category from the category list to see all the notes with the specified flag.

I have created two sample notes to illustrate the use of my noteflag workaround. First, below is a note that has an “Important” flag. I’ve selected the “–> Important<–” category from the category list and EverNote shows the note with the specific keyword highlighted:

Here is a view of the use of my “–>New Actions<–” category:

Finally, here is an example of the use of my “–>Waiting For<–” category. Note that it shows both notes that have this keyword.

One final note about my note taking system: when I note an action or a waiting-for item in my notes, I check it off when I’ve recorded it in my master action / task / project tracking system. I currently use Outlook within the framework of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, described in the book of the same name. I also am using the Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In utility.

In this EverNote workaround for noteflags, I can effectively check off a note within EverNote while still keeping the record of the flag that I put there by simply deleting one of the colons in the keyword. For example, when I’ve recorded the action in the example note above as an Outlook task, I delete one of the colons and it no longer appears in the “–>New Actions<–” category. You could also create an autocategory for “recorded actions” or “completed actions” if you wanted to. Note in the screenshot below that the “A:” is not highlighted and the “–>New Actions<–” category in the category list shows that there are no notes in that category:

If you use the concept of noteflags and wish to use EverNote, I hope this idea offers some help. If you approach this a different way with EverNote or with another utility, I’d love to hear about it.