Sometimes people continue to do things out of habit. Even if it’s not optimal, they will keep putting up with inconvenience and discomfort because the known is better than the unknown. But sometimes enough is enough. This last is why I left Evernote.
I Got To Thinking
I’ve written about my lukewarm feelings about Evernote before. I’ve always been aware of its disadvantages.
But when I was forced to abandon a tool I had used for years due to cost, I reconsidered what I was paying for with Evernote.
I was paying for software that was, at best, frustrating, and at worst (and more frequently) broken.
Problems with the Evernote Software
When I say broken, I don’t mean that the software didn’t run. But it did run inconsistently, and things were often…unexpected.
I work in IT. I understand software bugs. And I’m fairly tolerant of them. But as I dug around in the help forums I began to see a pattern, of which I found confirmation in my own use.
- Desktop version is slow. Evernote can be run through the web interface, or you can run it on your computer or mobile device. The desktop version is markedly slower than either the web or mobile versions, sometimes taking up to 30 minutes to synchronize between what is on the servers and the local system. Even if the only thing that changed was adding one note.
- Functionality differs greatly between the platforms. The way that the program functions differs between the web, computer and mobile applications. All three versions look and act very differently, and for a long time the web application didn’t have much of the functionality of the desktop version.
- Web tags aren’t reflected in immediate searches. When Evernote started to upgrade their web application, I started noticing a problem with the tags. I had several saved searches that focused on specific tags, but when I would tag a note it wouldn’t appear in the saved searches. In fact, specifically searching on the tag wouldn’t bring up the note, even though I could find the note and verify the tag was there. It often took 15 minutes for the note to appear in searches on the tags.
- Desktop and web searches produce different results. After noticing the above anomaly with the tag searches, I started using the desktop versions, but I would find that even after the notes all synchronized to my desktop, the searches were still not returning the same results. Different notes were left out of the web searches than the desktop ones.
- Linking to RTM was spotty. One of the reasons I used Evernote is because it could link to Remember The Milk with a single click. But it started to be sporadic. I often had to link and unlink the Evernote items to get it to go over to RTM.
So I don’t really know what is going on with the internals of the software. But having the experience in the industry, it looks like they are either a server farm that has serious lag or they are batching their data requests. Either way, not good design.
Problems with my Evernote System
So the problems with Evernote showed up all the problems with how I was using Evernote.
You see, I used Evernote to store both reference material and my someday/maybe/active project list. So I used the various notebooks to separate information by what I call life area of focus, and then relied on the tags to let me figure out what was reference material and what was actionable. Then I used the linking to Remember the Milk to push things over.
Do you see why the software issues torpedoed my system?
But it really wasn’t a very good system. I know, as an IT and data person, you don’t mix your information. Putting reference material and an active project list in the same place is like storing all of your clothes and food in the refrigerator.
I also found out that there was no good way to clean things out. With tags and searches being unreliable, I couldn’t unmix the information – I couldn’t get the clothes out of the refrigerator.
The End Result
The end result was that I made the decision I was no longer going to pay to use software that didn’t work as software, and that didn’t work for what I needed it to do.
And so the search is on…where did I go next? I’ll address that in next week’s article.
