Info 202 F12

Michael Hyatt, the former Chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, wrote a blog recently on “How to organize Evernote for maximum efficiency”. In his article, he gave tips on using Evernote to organize documents and setup a paperless office. Even though this article does not explicitly discuss any new issue about organizing, it reflects several key points we have learned from the INFO 202 class.

Many of us use Evernote for note taking and archiving. By definition, Evernote is an organizing system that houses our intentionally arranged collection of, but not limited to, meeting notes, scanned documents, video and audio clips, and photographs. It allows use to create, search, store, and retrieve these resources. We follow many organizing principles when we use Evernote, perhaps unknowingly until we attended our first INFO 202 lecture. In his article, Hyatt recommended to “establish a solid organizational structure” in order to use Evernote to its full capabilities. He defined terms such as “Notebooks”, “Stacks”, and “Tags” and illustrated how he organized his notes in both “hierarchical” and “lateral” ways. If you think about it, he was demonstrating a principle of using multiple resource properties to organize. The notes themselves can be organized based on their intrinsic properties, such as created date or document type (PDF files vs. JPEG files). The descriptive tags applied to the resources, are the extrinsic properties used organize the resources into different categories. Hyatt organized his Evernote in such way that his intended interactions with the system, searching and locating notes with least effort, were not only enabled but optimized.

One interesting detail in the article is that Hyatt had to prefix his work related notes with the word “Work” to organize them properly, because Evernote does not support nested Stacks. It gives us a glimpse of how technology can impose constraint on the way we can organize. On the other hand, Hyatt spoke about how “it is temping to tag every note with several tags” and why the “less(tagging) is more”. Evernote automatically “indexes every word in every note”. This is an embodiment of the notion that searching and retrieving by computer-generated descriptions of resources is more cost-effective and accurate, than by human-generated tags. Therefore, with the aid of technology, we can avoid organizing too much, as technology will do the dirty work for us. It organizes much more. 

Looking beyond Hyatt's blog, with Evernote’s recent expansion Enterprise 2.0 market (Evernote Business), I can almost imagine how constraints imposed by laws and regulations becomes increasingly relevant for the application. If we are to use Evernote in workspace to store both personal and work related information, and allow sharing of resources among teams, how does Evernote facilitate privacy control? How should Evernote be maintained by the business? How to define what notes are personal versus company owned? If an employee leaves the company, can he or she take any notes with them? Who’s access policy can address these issues? I very much look forward to the rest of the course to find out.