Earlier this week, I received this tweet that caused a bit of introspection:

Justin Merwin ‏@Thewizard_210 Dec 14

@mguhlin Are you still an avid @evernote user? How has it benefited you as a Tech Director?

The answer is, “Yes, darn it!” I give such a response, Justin, because in spite of my best efforts to transition to the Apple Notes app following David Pogue’s lead, with over 5K in notes, the darn thing is TOO SLOW. So, I slowly found myself gravitating back to Evernote (ok, I’m 100% back to using it).

While I still employ Google Keep for frivolous notes–grocery lists, shared tasks lists with colleagues/family–I rely on Evernote to organize my life. It’s the one place I can “archive” information in whatever format and know it will be there.

As a technology director, I rely on Evernote to provide my digital archive for the following:

• critical emails (I use CloudMagic app on my mobile phone to drop content into Evernote, but since I’m a Premium user, I can just forward emails to Evernote and see them appear)
• GUI editor for notes
• to do lists and tasks that are ongoing
• documents (PDFs, etc.)
• A virtual space to prepare responses
• a place to save business cards
• a place to save quotes, proposals that I need to keep track of long-term.

As nice as Google Drive is–and even though I’m very organized–dropping something into Drive can be the equivalent of flipping a coin into the sea and hoping to jump in a day later and find it…an act of hope and luck.

Since I’ve cleaned out Evernote, it runs a lot faster. I don’t use WorkChat or any of the weird features Evernote developers have added. I don’t even use Evernote for archiving web sites or content, something I once did avidly. All those notebooks are gone. Evernote is NOT a content curation tool anymore.

That’s how I use Evernote. It works for me and I enjoy the experience more than GoogleDrive, but that’s not to say I’m not an Google heavy user. I wish Google Keep could allow for more organization, make it easier to drop documents into it. But I’ve given up waiting…Evernote is still my go-to.