When I was done, my notebook listing looked like this:

I did have to add notebooks, but not as many as they suggested.

The official Evernote GTD system from the David Allen Company is a good start, but unnecessarily complex, #turnsout. So much so that I started wondering what else I could do with these notes that could suddenly be so many places at once thanks to tagging. This, along with my Inbox and Trash notebooks, comprised my entire Evernote database.Īnd it actually worked okay. In my wandering through the Evernote-free wilderness, I’d liked the simplicity of tags in Simplenote and Vesper, so I thought, “Maybe this will work.” I created tags for all my existing notebooks, tagged the notes in those notebooks appropriately, and moved all my notes into a single notebook called Reference. Basically, it describes an Evernote database with only three notebooks and a hierarchy of tags. I was on OmniFocus and actually enjoying it when I returned to Evernote from OneNote for my note taking (long story) and I saw this article about the right way to use Evernote. Over time, I bounced from iCloud Reminders to Todoist, to OmniFocus and back. Most of them required complicated hierarchies of tags and notebooks, and I felt like I’d be spending far more time implementing the system than actually, you know, doing stuff. I’ve seen lots of implementations of GTD on Evernote over the years, but they all seemed too fiddly, including the official one from David Allen. I finally have a GTD (© DavidCo 2001) system that works.

Evernote gtd setup guide