Why I like Evernote more than Notion
Notion has a whole bunch of concepts. There are lists! Which are not quite the same as pages, but they also are pages. But you can’t put text on them. And, it’s hard to put pages under them, even though lists only contain other pages. Also, you can’t just say "I am going to list all the pages under this page in this page as a list." So it’s very powerful, and very flexible. And you can have links, and back links, and everything can be in multiple places, and… Didn’t I already go through this with Workflowy? It’s so amazing, it’s so flexible, it’s just like your mind, which is amazingly flexible and allows for massive complexity.
Enter Evernote, with its antiquated simple concepts. You have notebooks that have pages in them. You also can have notebook stacks, which can only contain notebooks. You cannot have notebook stacks of notebooks stacks of notebooks. You cannot put notebooks in other notebooks, nor can you put pages directly in notebook stacks. There is no way that I know of to get a list of pages inside a notebook in another page. Unless you want a link to the pages yourself.
So the paradigm is extremely simple.
So for MIDI Designer, for instance, I have a Notebook stack called MIDI Designer. Then, inside that I have a notebook called MD tickets. And another notebook called MD tickets closed. And then I have another Notebook called MIDI Designer knowledge, or MIDI Designer K base. And then I have another Notebook called MIDI Designer marketing. If I was serious about marketing, that might become several notebooks.
And so, Evernote is the ultimate trash bin, but it’s very organized for how to record information. And where information will be later. For instance, for my day job, I have another notebook under the Day-Job Stack called meetings. and another notebook called journal, which contains notes by week, mostly.
Somehow, the simple paradigm lines up nicely and keeps me from feeling overwhelmed and confused. Notion, on the other hand, is so flexible I can never figure out where to go next, and definitely not quickly.
I should note that I do some things outside of Evernote. Or a lot of things. For instance, I use Microsoft To Do for my to do list. And that’s on top of my bullet journal that I keep in Notability on iPad with pencil. And then I have my journal in Day One. I should note that it's important to pick winners in other categories to avoid thrash. I had picked Wunderlist which became Microsoft To Do but... sniff.
Update
Things I do with Evernote that Notion doesn't do (I think):
- I pay Evernote to be able to email notes to my Evernote notebooks.
- Evernote can publish individual notes, which is how you're reading this.
- I use Evernote to publish my blogs, including this one via Postach.io and some that are critical to my business. It's not perfect, clearly.
Things Evernote sucks at:
- Their document scanner on iOS is the worst, but you can use Genius Scan.
- Their Apple Pencil app also sucks but you can use any other.
- They don't do great with code blocks, but at least they don't mangle things like OneNote
- I haven't used Evernote much for collaboration, so I don't know how it does. It ain't Google Docs, that's for sure.
