My Current Productivity Stack (2023)
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Like many of you, I’ve been an Evernote user for many years — almost a full decade. But a few things have made me wary of continuing to use Evernote: one, even after many years and many updates, I can’t trust that my notes will sync properly in Evernote. This has been a major annoyance for me. Two, this latest huge price hike. I didn’t mind the $70 a year to have a decent app, but nearly doubling the price for a product that will be giving me what I’ve already had for a couple of years and STILL not fix the sync issues substantially? I’m not a fan.
So I’ve been exploring new note-taking app options. I like to keep my finger on the pulse of what note-taking/PKM apps people are talking about, but now this isn’t mere exploration, this is me looking to find something I will be using every day and will be my workhorse. What I’ve run into is that there are many apps out there claiming to be an Evernote alternative, but I have my very specific wants and needs that may not necessarily align with what these apps are touting as their alternatives.
I’ve been using Todoist as my task manager for about as long as I’ve been with Evernote. Todoist isn’t going anywhere for me. It’s a major foundation of my whole system, and even though so many other apps have task functions, they aren’t as good as what I have with Todoist. I used the Tasks function of Evernote for major projects to keep them on my horizon, but all the nitty-gritty is kept in Todoist. So I knew going into this that task management wouldn’t be a priority since Todoist just does the best job for me in that regard.
My Needs:
- Excellent sync abilities. Honestly, pretty much everyone does a better job with this than Evernote has. I don’t want to have to constantly force sync, or close out the app, or wait 5 minutes before what I’m looking for shows up. I’ve lost notes and time too much.
- Web clipping abilities. I think most of us agree that Evernote’s Web Clipper is one of the best things about it. I don’t use this function as much anymore since I now clip most of the things I’m reading into Reader by Readwise, but sometimes you want to save a whole article or web page for reasons, and I want to continue to do that.
