For almost nine and a half years, I was an avid user of Evernote. I’ve been a premium (now listed as Personal) subscriber for about as long, but no more. I have decided to switch over to Notion and leave Evernote behind. Let me tell you what happened.
What my writing process was for daily writing before Notion
I’ve been writing daily for almost three months now, and when I started, I was writing all of my blog post drafts in Evernote. I had a specific notebook in Evernote that I would open up and write in, so that all of the blog posts stayed in the same location. Without fail, I would sit at my desk, pull up a show, pull up an online timer, and pull up Evernote and select that notebook. I did it every day and had no problems for almost a month. In fact, I didn’t realize anything was wrong until three days before my one-month mark.
When I noticed that there was something wrong
On May 15th, when I opened up my blog post notebook, I noticed that May 9th was the most recent date in the notebook. And yet I had videos of me writing during the past few days, but no notes could be found. I went quickly into panic mode as I couldn’t find my notes anywhere. I checked the notebook in which I wrote them, I checked the entirety of my notes in Evernote, and nothing matched the dates that I was missing. Even worse, I can’t remember what I wrote on those days. (Yes, I’m writing this in July, but even days after the 15th, I couldn’t remember).
Only one post was recovered
I got lucky, though. On the Saturday during those missing days, I was editing posts and watching a Lord of the Rings marathon. The only reason I have that day’s post is that I had, at some point during the day, copied the post from Evernote and moved it into Grammarly to start editing it. Thanks to that, I could keep that post, but the others remain missing.
Filming for TikTok is the only proof I have
It boggles my mind that I can’t find the posts, but it also makes me so grateful that I film every writing session. Without those videos, I wouldn’t for sure remember that I had written anything that day. And because I don’t batch record writing videos (which would defeat the purpose of writing daily), I can trust that if I have a video for a specific day, I did write that day.
What I am doing now
So from May 15th, I started writing in Notion and haven’t returned to Evernote. It’s worked a lot better for me. I’m able to keep better information, such as the date that I wrote the piece (which isn’t always the date I created the entry, because sometimes I work on the outline earlier), the blog post link when I’ve scheduled it, the TikTok video link, as well as the blog post itself. Most importantly, I haven’t had to stress about losing my posts.
The straw that broke the camel’s back
In all fairness, if this had been the only issue, I probably would have continued with Evernote rather than start over with a different system. But I had been having minor issues here and there with Evernote, enough of them so that when this happened, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ve since canceled my subscription, and then I will be keeping my free account (once my premium account reverts to free at the end of the subscription period) until such time that I have moved what I want over to Notion or have decided I no longer wish to keep the files.
What’s a reason that would make you want to leave a long-used note-taking or project management system? Share in the comments below.
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