Evernote in trouble?

Posted by thouqht
Sep 6, 2018 at 06:34 PM

I dislike Evernote for many reasons

- Lack of extended note hierarchy
- No custom sorting of notes/notebooks outside of cumbersome naming conventions
- Lack of markdown support
- Lack of basic style options (please give me headings)
- Android app won’t auto populate the title with the first line of the note like the Win Desktop version does (may seem like a little thing but it’s super over the long run)

I actually despise these things and would leave EN if I could. There are two big reasons I don’t.

1. Search & Tagging
They do these things very well. Evernote is the best place to dump stuff with little organization necessary. You can either not organize at all & rely on search, or with an extra second you can quickly tag things.

Sadly the bulk of my work benefits greatly from hierarchical organization, so Evernote tends to only act as a gateway rather than an endpoint for the majority of my information. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Information Capture

Evernote is simply the best all-around cross platform “inbox” for the frictionless capture of information. My work is creative in nature, and I have many responsibilities. If I don’t capture inspiration or todo’s when they hit me, then I suffer greatly in the long run.

Evernote mitigates this suffering by offering the slickest capture on Windows and Android (my main platforms).

The other top contenders to replace EN is OneNote and Google Keep. But I can’t justify the switch because

1. OneNote is slower on capture, awkward storage of “quick capture” notes, and doesn’t offer page tagging for rapidly organizing notes as I take them.

2. Google Keep has no desktop app and cannot open a window per note on desktop. I don’t need more browser tabs.

Evernote is in a weird position of doing a few extremely critical tasks very well, while being otherwise mediocre. Their lack of product improvement over the years is mildly infuriating.

If they just improved their dang product in the ways their users have screamed about for years, they wouldn’t be in any trouble at all.

Now I’m sitting over here praying that Notion.so offers some slick quick-capture ability so I can leave EN for forever…