Onenote Has Been Syncing For Ever Full Of Crap
Onenote Has Been Syncing For Ever Free Writing Mode

Unless you plan on using the screenshots for anything other than saving or dragging into Slack once, leave them in the default notebook.

I made a solemn oath never to use Windows software again, but last week, I did something that really shocked me.

Then why, I ask myself, am I submitting myself to a Microsoft product when I dont have to ever see Microsoft again Two reasons: I have made a terrible mess of my Evernote.

In this post, Im going to share my experiences with Evernote and OneNote, compare them, and give you an idea of how I get value out of them as a writer and note-hoarder spending all my waking hours on a laptop.

Evernote: The Everything Bucket My Evernote has been reduced from a well-indexed scrapbook of research to a heap of Untitled Quick Notes thrown 1000-deep into the default notebook.

While searching around for a way to fix this, or an Evernote alternative, I found a great piece by Alex Payne making the case against apps like Evernote and why they encourage us to be more disorganized: Computers work best with structured data.

Everything Buckets discourage the use of structured data by providing a convenient place to commingle structureless data like RTF and PDF documents.

Rather than forcing the user to figure out the rhyme and reason of their data (for example, by putting receipts in a financial management application and addresses in an address book), Everything Buckets cry: throw it all in here Search it The Case Against Everything Buckets, Alex Payne Yes, Evernote is a fantastic tool because of its features, but it does nothing to encourage you to get into good habits.

Armed with the screenshot hotkey, youll quickly run up piles of unindexed data and bury any meaningful notes you were planning on referring back to.

The Major Problems with Evernote For all its good points (getting to that in a moment), Evernote has a lot of flaws.

The first of which is that for an organizational tool, its not particularly easy to organize.

Onenote Has Been Syncing For Ever Full Of Crap

It gets rammed full of crap Around 90 of my notes are screenclips.

I use Evernote precisely because I dont want to go through the process of saving the image file somewhere, then opening it and uploading it to its destination.

As Alex Payne says: Everything Buckets are selling you a filesystem, and removing the step of creating and saving a new file within that filesystem Thanks to that setup, if youre not careful your Evernote will end up looking like this: Notebooks are not the way to go There comes a moment where theres no point in organizing all your rubbish.

It would take several hours to go back and undo the damage caused by almost a year of abuse, so Ive taken to using even poorer methods to fix it.

As Jason Frasca notes: What you do not want is too many notebooks.

Notebooks become difficult to scroll and hard to make sense of once you get above 30 notebooks.

The way I saw it, a notebook stack was the perfect place to house God-knows-how-many notebooks.

With all its focus on clipping, it neglects actual writing While Evernote isnt the most pro writing tool in a master bloggers toolkit, the fact that its so valuable for organizing research means that its a good idea to store drafts and research in same digital space.

Makes sense, right But here come the problems.

Onenote Has Been Syncing For Ever Free Writing Mode

No H1, H2, etc. No markdown support No distraction-free writing mode Everythings locked to a grid How to Improve Your Evernote Experience Dont worry Almost every major Evernote problem has a solution.

And that solution isnt just switch to OneNote as Im going to get to in a moment.

Push all of your screenclips into their own notebook The mistake I made with Evernote was creating a default notebook for myself called Inbox then never processing it because it was too full of rubbish.

If, like me, most of your notes are screenshots, then your default notebook should be called Screenshots and automatically save your clips there.

Mac Onenote Has Been Syncing For Ever