Eleven years ago, I wrote on this blog in praise of Evernote:

My life runs on Evernote. It allows me to appear far more organised than I actually am. If anyone ever asks if I have a copy of something, I almost always know that the answer is ‘yes,’ and that I can find it in seconds with a simple search.

I stopped using Evernote many years ago, but I haven’t forgotten what it taught me. Evernote taught me the value of search over filing. I rarely file anything these days because search tools are generally too powerful to bother.

I realise in retrospect that much of the way I used Evernote–despite the above quote–was filing. For example, I would tend to have notes that combined emails and documents about a single topic. I wouldn’t bother with that nowadays: why bother to put all of that together in a single note when I could just search for the bits I need—usually emails—in their original location?

These days, I use OneNote—Evernote’s major competitor—the same way as I used to use a paper notebook: one ‘note’ per day. Anything I need to jot down during the day goes on the note—not in some separate topic-dedicated special folder. It doesn’t need to be filed because it is searchable. The only reason I use OneNote instead of Evernote is because that’s what my employers provide.

Evernote may not have stayed around in my life for long, but it’s clearly had a lasting impact on how I work.