I’ve written about productivity a few times before. For me to adopt something new it has to be easy to use and available everywhere. Also there has to be a real need for me to try it. And when I try it, I need to commit to really trying it out.
I have one problem with bookmarking services. I currently use Google Bookmarks and Delicious. The problem for me is context. A lot of times I want to read something later, or remind myself to do something later. With traditional bookmarking services, I’m limited to the tag. And although with both you can write comments, it’s not nearly flexible enough. So I end up never getting back to what I’ve tagged as “actionable.”
Since I’m now using Chrome full time, I’ve lessened my addiction to Google’s toolbar (not fully however as I still want it badly for site search and other things). Instead of toolbars, I now rely on bookmarklets.
I don’t want to get into a full comparison of features among Evernote, Google Bookmarks, and Delicious. Rather, I’ll just explain why I’m excited about Evernote, which I’m going to give a serious test drive.
What Evernote allows you to do in one swoop is highlight a part of a webpage (images and/or text) and use the bookmarklet to “clip” it. You can then save what’s clipped, the url, and the page title (which can be edited). You can add a tag and note to the clip as well. So where this picks up from where the other bookmark services leave off is the ability to easily add in why I’m saving it (like what I need to do), along with the “clip” of the site I’ve saved. Delicious is close, but not as robust.
Evernote also has a mobile phone interface which is nice. According to their blog, they are planning and developing an app for Android (they currently have one for the iPhone). If all goes well with my test, I’ll be psyched to have a native client on my G1.
Now lets see how it goes.