Personal and Professional knowledge Management System(s)

I was listening to the “focused” podcast and then an episode of “Mac power users” about PKM (personal knowledge management) systems. Basically what app to use. 

A while back I got into Evernote. It was elegantly designed and allowed met to access my notes on stuff everywhere (iPad, phone, computer). Ideal. I have taken copious notes on a conference for example. I’d like to take notes on talks and tag them (this is aspirational, I still take notes on paper). 

And I like to take notes (plenty of sketches) while I talk to my students. The iPad and Apple pen are really nice to use there. But Evernote isn’t really great with the sketches. And I’ve noticed I stopped using it almost completely. It loads super slow on phone and iPad so I move on. 

So I noticed I partially stopped using Evernote but I do keep notes and save links. But they are scattered everywhere. Two email systems (work and personal) hold notes I’ve taken, there is the iPhone notes app that I’m typing in right now, Twitter and Facebook bookmarks, random text files on my desktop, paper notes, google docs, and I suspect there are more. 

So I need a single system that

1 works on iPad, phone and computers 

2 allows me to sketch

3 synchs easily between everything

4 doesn’t take forever to load

5 OCRs my sketches for ease of finding stuff

6 allows me to share a note easily

7 allows me to back and forward link notes to see connections 

8 can link to other stuff (like references in bibliography) 

9 I can just drag a pdf and other files in and done. 

So do I reinvigorate my Evernote? Or move everything into Craft? Or will craft slow to an unmanageable crawl as I load all the stuff into it? Time to explore. 

This weekend was the final straw. I tried to put some loose ideas I had while running into Evernote. The phone app just sucks. It takes a literal minute to load (yep. a whole 60 seconds, waaaay too long for this). And copies things weirdly, does not capture tweets (critical since so many people tweet links to interesting papers or data etc).

I am migrating notes from *everywhere* to Craft. It does not OCR yet but let's see.