… to graduation from the 2 year program at RIT leading to a Master’s in Product Development. The time and effort I have put in to adding content into PersonalBrain over the past 18 months is beginning to pay off. PersonalBrain has been invaluable in creating and maintaining my social network, and now I am leveraging the tool to incorporate linkages between papers and reports that we are reading for school. When you tie this information in with important concepts from 18 months of classes it all starts to come together rather nicely. What I really appreciate the most about PersonalBrain is its ability to index through PDF files, as you can imagine, I have many. I enjoy turning the Wander mode on ever so often and have PersonalBrain run through a randomized sequence of thoughts from the Brain. It is amazing how much information has been conveyed to us! It has been nothing short of trying to assimilate a barrage of information, kind of like drinking from a firehose.

I am on a well-earned break between semesters at school. I’ve recently completed my first year of a two year executive program leading to a Master’s in  Product Development at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I’ve been intensively using EverNote, MindManager Pro 6 and 7, Personal Brain, OneNote 2007 and FolderShare to capture and synchronize my class notes. I’ve also been using Scrybe, Diigo and Facebook to capture schedules, manage groups and communicate with classmates and faculty. On the analog lofi side of things I’ve been using Levenger Circa and Moleskines. I intend to post my experiences with using these tools over the course of a year and my wishes for better integration of tools to support knowledge capture and management.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time with EverNote Plus 1.5 recently. I’m so glad that I submitted a handwriting sample and obtained a license for EverNote Plus 1.1, and even more grateful that EverNote provided free upgrades to EverNote Plus 1.5 when it was released. I haven’t played much with the new features such as PC to PC Synchronization and the ability to open multiple databases - instead I have been trying to organize my reading lists. A couple of months ago when I started using EverNote
I read an essay on how GTDWannabe uses EverNote to organize research materials. Back then I filed this information away in del.icio.us. Now I use the technique espoused in the essay of using keywords such as @get[] and implemented a rudimentary state machine to help me organize personal, academic and professional reading lists.

I’ve been reading through the EverNote user manual to learn more about this tool. EverNote has a concept called Keyword Categories. You can create new categories and specify rules for each category. For example, I could create a category called GTD and specify that  a note belongs to this category if the keywords “GTD” or “Getting Things Done” or “David Allen” appear in the note. Actually, EverNote provides rich semantics for specifying these rules. Now your notes can be dynamically categorized
based on the rules you have specified.

 

Technorati Tags: EverNote, GTD

I’ve been using this following analog/digital, lofi/hifi combination as my GTD setup:

• Outlook for email, next actions and the hard landscape
• Freemind to capture Projects and Someday/Maybes as well as to do some brainstorming
• File folders for analog information
• DIY Levenger Circa / Rollabind notebook for must-have hardcopies
• Cornell Notes template from D*I*Y Planner that are filed in the notebook using the Circa punch
• 3×5 cards using the D*I*Y Planner templates that are filed in the notebook using the Circa punch

And now for the latest entry… EverNote Plus.