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Simplify your Getting Things Done Workflow with Evernote and Automation

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GTD with Evernote

Getting Things Done or short GTD is a popular productivity method by David Allen. The main goal is to work more productive while reducing the mental workload.

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them (David Allen)

The Getting Things Done system does not require special tools, so there are dozen of different tools that you can use to setup your personal GTD.

The Top Five Benefits from using Getting Things Done

1.) The most important task of the GTD method is to collect all your ideas, material, and todos into one inbox. As soon as you trust your inbox and your system, your brain stops to remind your every few seconds on random things. Instead, it will relieve you of the mental workload of reminding everything. This helps you to get a clear mind and focus on your progress.

2.) If you write down all your thought, nothing get lost anymore. Everything is in the system and you can be sure to have access to it in the right moment. Whenever you need it.

3.) During the weekly and monthly review, you go through all your open tasks, project and ideas. This allows you to plan what are the next actions to do. Due to nature of breaking all bigger tasks down to small actionable pieces it is much easier to really do them. This is an import step to overcome procrastination.

4.) Most systems require the usage of priorities. This is a really hard task. For example, if you have five priorities P1, P2, … P5 you have to decide for every single task if it is a P3 or maybe a P2. With Getting Things Done you don’t have to invest this thought. Instead you can organize your tasks into contexts like home, work, or town. With this contexts you will only see actions you can do right now.

5.) Getting Things Done combines perfectly with the Inbox Zero. With Inbox Zero you have the goal to reduce all items in your inbox to zero. With the GTD system you have the perfect way to achieve this.

So there are many advantages of using Getting Things Done. A famous tool to implement GTD is Evernote.

Why is Evernote the Perfect Companion to GTD?

Evernote is a tool that allows you to collect all kinds of information. It claims to “remember everything”. We think this is right. There are so many ways to store information in Evernote that it could be used as the system to store all your documents, ideas, and of cause tasks.

If you use the same system to store your material and your tasks you have all in one place. No need to search in different tools, no need to decide which is the right app to store this piece of information. If you use Evernote for your Getting Things Done implementation you can easily transform actionable items into reference material, whenever you finish a task.

Also Evernote allows you to create links from one note to another note. This allows you to reference important material directly in your project lists or todo notes.

As mentioned before, you can use a lot of different ways to collect stuff in Evernote. You can use the client itself to create quick notes. You can use your email application to forward emails as reference material or actionable items directly into Evernote. You can use the webclipper to collect interesting web pages or you can setup your scanner to send scanned documents directly into your Evernote inbox.

Let Automations Assist you during the whole Process

One drawback of intense GTD usage is, that there are lot of managements tasks todo in your system. While processing your inbox you have to categorize the items. You have to take care of your regular reviews. And you have to clean up your system and delete or archive finished tasks for later usage.

Filterize as a digital assistant for your Evernote can relieve you from these repetitive tasks so you can increase your productivity even more. Use the saved time for things that really matter.

Automated Dashboard Notes

With Filterize you can create dashboards for your contexts, projects or your delegated list. Dashboards are notes with dynamic tables of contents. With our predefined Getting Things Done Workflow you can have notes that organize your tasks by urgency like now, next or later with respect to the tasks context.

Evernote Dashboard for next tasks

Tasks you have to do now and next

Delegate Tasks to Users without Evernote

You can define a rule in Filterize that sends an email to your colleague whenever a note has a certain tag. If you use tag to identify the person you want to delegate the task to you can use this rule to inform him/her about the delegated task.

Delegate Task

Use Template for more Structured Notes

You love structured notes and you use templates in your daily life? Filterize can help you with this templates in your GTD process. For example, you can create a template for all of you project notes. This helps you to collect all relevant information like your goal, the reasons why, and all subtasks for your project. With Filterize you can setup a rule that puts your template in every note that has a specific tag, like “project”. Existing content of a note will be kept and placed within the template. So you can apply templates automatically, even when you started to create the note.

Handle finished Tasks

Once you are done with a task you either delete it or archive it as reference material for later usage. If you classify your notes during your inbox processing, Filterize can keep track of them, when you mark the reminder as done. Based on your decision beforehand Filterize could move the note into trash or into an appropriate notebook.

Support for your Weekly and Monthly Review

One of the most important tasks in Getting Things Done is to do your weekly and monthly review to keep your GTD system working. The easiest way to do this is to create a checklist for both of them. You can apply a reminder to the review notes, so Evernote reminds you whenever the review is due.

If you prepare the next review, you have to uncheck all checkboxes of your checklist and reschedule the reminder to the next week or month. Filterize can automate this completely. Just setup a filter that unchecks your checkboxes and create a new reminder in a month or week. You can trigger this automation with the last open checkbox in your review checklist.

Let Filterize process your inbox

If you collect all your stuff in your inbox, you maybe recognize that often you have similar items to process. For example, you move all your cooking receipts into the references folder and you add the tags private and receipt. This is a great opportunity for automation.

We build EvA an artificial intelligence that recognizes repetitive actions on similar notes. Whenever EvA find a rule that could explain your action, Eva will suggest it at the Filterize page. All you have to do is to select the rules that fits your intent best. From now on, EvA takes care of these inbox items.

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Filterize dashboards enable one of the “best hacks Evernote has seen”

Evernote Hacks

evernote filterize dashboard

Evernote tweeted this as a reaction to an idea by our friend and Evernote Certified Consultant Enrico Nahler. Enrico had used Filterize to build a dashboard that gives him instant access to all his most important notes. Clearly, Evernote was very impressed, calling it “one of the best hacks” they have ever seen using their product.

What is a dashboard?

In Evernote, a dashboard is a note that provides direct links to all your most important data. A dashboard shows you the information you need fast at a single glance and lets you access it with just one click. Read More

The Ten Most Useful Evernote Search Queries

Evernote Hacks

evernote search syntax

Anyone who uses Evernote will use search queries sooner or later. If you use Evernote intensively, you will soon have thousands of notes. Then searching only for keywords won’t be precise enough for you, because it returns too many results. But if you know how to search like a pro, you can save yourself a lot of time and hassle. In this article, we will show you 10 useful Evernote search queries. Read More

How a Dashboard Helps You to Focus in Evernote

Using Filterize

 

 

If you use Evernote intensively, you will have a large number of notes that are distributed among many notebooks. This makes it very hard for you to keep track of the information that you need at any particular time. With a self-refreshing dashboard using Filterize, you can see all the data that is important to you on a single screen and access it with just one click.

In this article, we describe how to create a self-refreshing dashboard using Filterize and provide a free dashboard template to inspire you to create one of your own. We also include a link to a how-to video made by our friend Enrico Nahler which Evernote called “one of the best hacks we’ve seen“.    

The problem with a large Evernote database: Losing track of your information

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Mail-handling in Evernote

Using Filterize

Do you store all your ideas, notes, and documents in Evernote? What about emails? Do you want to archive them there too? It’s easier than you maybe think.

This article will show 2 ways how to send and organize emails in Evernote. Move mails into the right notebook, add appropriate tags and set reminders.

Use Evernote mail features

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Extract a creation date for your note out of your document

Using Filterize

Extract_creation_date.001.png

Evernote helps you to become paperless, to pool all important stuff at one digital place and to work easily with every kind of documents. But probably there is still a lot of paperwork you have to handle. To handle it, scan it! And archive those documents in Evernote. One great benefit, you can search now for them without exactly knowing where to find them. But there is a small pitfall, the date of creation in Evernote. Of course the date will be the day, when you created the note in Evernote. But the note creation date is then maybe months or even years away from the document creation time. Nicer would be, to have the documents creation date also as note creation date in Evernote.

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Here’s how easily you can protect your notes!

Using Filterize

Do you know the situation when you work with your team and some notes are for reading only or should be indelible? Because it happens time and time again that in the hurry of everyday life important notes are accidentally deleted because they were confused with others. What makes things worst is if these were the notes of the last meeting or an offer for a new customer.

Evernote has not built in a way to make single notes read-only or to protect them from being deleted.

With Filterize, there is finally a solution!

Read More