Whether it’s through the action I have set up in Dispatch for my iPhone or through the email address provided with my Evernote account, if an idea has comes my way via email (like when a new app is released or some PR comes my way that sparks a post idea) I’ll send it to Evernote. Then I’ll assign the idea to the appropriate folder directly, skipping the Inbox notebook altogether. If I find something on the web that sparks an idea, I’ll clip it with the Evernote Web Clipper.

Larger projects (like this Productivityist, for example) have notebook stacks that contain other related notebooks (Blog Posts, Products, etc.) within them. When I process the ideas, I’ll move them to other notebooks that are named after the various sites and projects I write for. If I’m away from my Mac, I’ll key in an idea for a post and then send it to my root Evernote notebook, which is called “Inbox” and then process the ideas in there later. I get my post ideas into Evernote in a number of ways: I’ll use something like “Write piece for 99u” so that I am triggered to go to the place where the stored ideas for 99u exist, which is in Evernote. So when I’m prompted to write for a specific site or project, the task is intentionally vague. But I don’t use my task manager to store my specific ideas. My task manager tells me when to write and for what site or project, and I have that set up because I’m writing for so many places these days. Evernote is a key cog in my “productivity path” and it’s where I organize all of my writing projects. I’ve touted Evernote as a place where I store a lot of information that I want to be able to access anytime and anywhere. It’s not great for ideation or larger writing project organization. My text editors are where the writing takes place, and it is the best place for that activity. Tagging written work only goes so far, and it isn’t something you can do in many operating systems, or even in both Mac OSX and in iOS because while you can use tags on the Mac but not in iOS. Keeping track of what should go where can be a real challenge in a writing app itself (I use Byword for articles and Scrivener for larger writing projects) because you can really only store things in a singular fashion unless you have a series of nested folders for each site or project.

I write for a lot of different sites and I write for a lot of different projects (books, etc.).

Notebook stack evernote mac