Engineers have a massive amount of data and information management to do. From vendor literature to materials specifications to control schemes to training courses and materials to ideas for designs and devices, the amount of stuff to remember is too much for one brain.

That’s why we need a second brain, and Evernote fits the bill.

How I Manage Information with Evernote

Evernote allows for storing and sorting notes in many ways: in notebooks, with tags, by author, by date created or modified, by URL (for web clippings), by location (latitude/longitude), and even by altitude.

Notes are just as flexible. A note can store text, files, or any combination. Image recognition is run on any images and the data is then stored with the note for searching.

The major advantage of Evernote to me is universal access. I can access my information on just about any device, the most important being a Mac and iPad at home, and a PC at work.

There are also many ways to add data to an acount. You can drag and drop or use keyboard shortcuts to clip on a Mac or PC. You can e-mail files to Evernote. You can record voice or take picture notes on mobile devices. You can have Evernote capture your tweets.

Limitations

As of the publication date, I understand the following limitations apply. I will correct this if I am wrong:

• 25 MB of data per note for free users and 50 MB notes for premium users
• 100 notebooks per account
• 10,000 tags per account
• 100,000 notes per account
• 60 MB per month of upload bandwidth per month for free users and 1 GB for premium users

Unlike DropBox, which limits your total storage, but does not limit bandwidth consumption, Evernote has not bandwidth limits, but does limit monthly uploading to 60 MB for free users and 1 GB for premium users.

Evernote’s Business Model: No Data Monetizing!

One significant point in Evernote’s favor is that, at least according to their CEO, their business plan does not depend upon mining or monetizing our data. They don’t sell it to third parties or even use it to direct advertising. CEO Phil Libin states,

Everything you put into Evernote is private by default. We never look at it, analyze it, share it, use it to target ads, data mine it, etc.–unless you specifically ask us to do one of these things. Our business model does not depend on “monetizing” your data in any way.

In the age of Google and Facebook, I certainly appreciate this, and it is a major factor in my use and support of Evernote.

Featured Features

Tags

In the dark old days, knowledge was organized hierarchically. Thus it was that if I had a book on the history of science, I had a troublesome choice: put this book on my “history” shelf or my “science” shelf. Either way, how would I find it or remember where I put it when I needed it? Old ways are not always good ways, and I never found the Dewey Decimal System (or worse, the Library of Congress classification system) satisfactory.

Then, came electronic computers and Evernote note tagging. Now, I put that book on either shelf (it doesn’t matter) and tag it with both science and history and I’m good to go. In Evernote, you can search by notebook, by notebook stack, or by tag. Problem solved.

Note: Mac OS X Spotlight is close, but doesn’t quite do the job either. I can certainly tag files with Spotlight, but no master index is available to me to keep my tags consistent. Maybe if I knew more Applescript, this wouldn’t be a problem, but Evernote fills my need better.

Note History

Note History came out about a year ago and has saved me unimaginable headaches. Evernote runs through their database a few times per day and takes snapshots of changed notes. If you lost or changed something and want to go back, you can recover the old version.

Location Mapping

The iPad client leans on the mapping application to map out notes that have identified locations. You can pinch to zoom in or out and locations are gathered or separated accordingly. This is one of my favorite features and I’d like to see it expanded to Mac and PC clients.

Note Links

Another recent feature, note links allows you to put hyperlinks in notes that point to other notes. This feature allows you to manually link to similar notes. I often use it for previous note / next note links in series.

Search Syntax

I make extensive use of the advanced search syntax, but a detailed description is buried in an appendix of some geeky API stuff and not particularly easy to find. For example, to find notes with “bacon” in the title, I can type “intitle:bacon*” in the search bar.

To find notes with locations, I can find notes between 40 and 41 degrees of latitude with “latitude:41 -latitude:40″ in the search bar.

To search notes with bacon in the title, but not tagged with breakfast, I can type “intitle:bacon* -tag:breakfast.”

This is extremely useful stuff, but you barely knows it exists unless you know to look for it.

My Tags

Now that we’ve reviewed some of the major features, one could be forgiven for asking “What do I need it for?” Therefore, unlike many other good reviews of Evernote, I will reveal some of the specific details of my account.

For example, I have over 1,000 tags, but a few of my significant tags are:

• #Worth Reviewing: For extra-special notes that are worth revisiting to refresh some valuable idea.
• #Work in Progress: For notes that need more work before being considered complete.
• #Frequently Updated: For notes that are updated often, but will never be “finished.” Example: my cash flow forecast.
• @STARS: This is a parent tag for five tags indicating different star ratings. I call my @ tags “consolidators” because they are not associated with notes, but they really clean up my tag list.
• @MACHINE COMPONENTS: Consolidator for tags related to brakes, clutches, fasteners, motors, pumps, and other machine components.
• misalignment: Notes from across several notebooks related to machine misalignment have this tag. Materials related to diagnosing and correcting misalignment are at my fingertips.
• MindTools: Even though I have a notebook for MindTools, this tag finds materials in other notebooks that I have created based on MindTools materials, in addition to original source materials.

My Stacks

I have many, many stacks and notebooks, but here are a few that might be of general interest for engineers or technical managers.

Science & Technology Stack

Some of the notebooks I keep in my Science & Technology stack are:

• Crafts & Skilled Trades (150 notes): Notes on welding, masonry, concrete, and electrical work from a trades perspective. Also contains project ideas that might be classified as crafts.
• Industrial Vendor Literature (133 notes): Literature published by people who want to sell me stuff.
• Math & Science (320 notes)
• Peer-Reviewed: Mathematics (320 notes): A special notebook for peer-reviewed articles in mathematics. For example, “Solution of Parabolic Equations by Backward Euler-Mixed Finite Element Methods on a Dynamically Changing Mesh.”
• Peer-Reviewed: Science & Technology (817 notes): A special notebook for peer-reviewed articles in Science & Technology. For example, “Numerical Predictions of Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow Characteristics for Seven Different Dimpled Surfaces in a Channel.”
• Technology & Engineering (1169 notes)

I also keep a few other notebooks with course materials and references from specific sources. For example, all training materials from my Reliability Solutions training course “Essential Reliability Engineering Skills” has its own notebook. So do copies of my IDCON condition monitoring standards.

Management & Productivity Stack

• Business & Marketing (537 notes)
• Creativity, Innovation & Problem Solving (111 notes): Notes on RCA methods (mostly PROACT and Cause Mapping), TRIZ, and other notes on innovation and problem-solving.
• EH&S Management (73 notes): Non-technical notes on industrial environmental, health, and safety subjects. Technical notes on these subjects are currently in the Technology & Engineering notebook, but at some point I may create a separate notebook for them.
• Kepner-Tregoe (103 notes)
• Management & Leadership (694 notes)
• MBM (60 notes): Notes on books and articles related to Market-Based Management, the business philosophy of Charles Koch and Koch Industries.
• MindTools (185 notes): Workbooks and web clippings on productivity, time management, leadership, creativity, and stress management from MindTools.com.
• Time Management & Productivity (132 notes)

Projects Stack

My Projects stack consists of one notebook for each of the employers I have had since using Evernote and one notebook named “My Projects.”

Directory Stack

This stack is focused on people and places, and contains the following notebooks:

• Business Cards (218 notes): Scanned business cards from all sources.
• Directions (16 notes): Miscellaneous driving or other directions.
• Locations (109 notes): Maps and information on cities, businesses, states, countries, or other geographic landmarks.
• People (47 notes): Clipped e-mail signatures and other contacts that I’ve typed in manually, but from whom I did not receive a business card.

Problems I’ve Had

1. At one point, my Mac client started deleting tags, which I didn’t notice until after I had synchronized. I depend quite heavily on tags to differentiate between notes that contain a word and notes that have substantial information on a topic, so this represented a significant loss to me. However, I had regular contact with staff on the matter and the issue had not emerged again.
2. My database is so massive (currently hovering just below 20,000 notes, over 1,000 tags and over 10 GB) that the web and iPad clients run slowly, and not at all on mobile phones (even with only headers loading). However, performance improvements on the Mac and PC clients have really helped the local clients. The program runs very well on my Mac and PC.
3. When I update tags in a shared notebook, they don’t always appear to the shared notebook viewer. For someone with modify permissions to my notebook, they only get to add tags that were on the list when they first got the notebook.
4. The internal text editor is very buggy. Not only does it look a lot like HTML 1.0, but it doesn’t even do that very well. If formatting is very important, use PDFs or other programs and save the documents. To be fair, web clipping has improved over the years, but it’s still not right.
5. Searching by some of the less features attributes, such as author, don’t always turn up correct results.

Features I’d Like to See

1. Stacks of stacks. You can certainly gather notebooks in stacks, and this is a great recent addition, but this only goes one level deep. Improve stack versatility to add value to the program.
2. Bring the iPad/iPhone location feature to the Mac and PC! Navigating your notes on a map is awesome!
3. Let users do more data mining. What are the most common tag combinations? Can the program automatically identify similar notes for us? What are the most common tags within a notebook?
4. Maintain a list of locations and allow them to be applied to notes the same way as tags. Copying and pasting latitudes and longitudes gets tedious. Let me make a fixed location (home, work, stores, etc.) and drop them onto notes like tags.
5. Let us copy text directly out of images and PDFs, like in OneNote. Evernote allows us to search and find words in images, but we can’t do anything with the text once it’s found.
6. Bring back Evernote Portable and let us run the program locally from a USB device. I really miss that!
7. Have a call-in telephone number to add voice notes from a regular phone. Not a big deal, but that would be kind of cool.

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