I’ve been a fan of Evernote for a long time. I think I got my first paid subscription back in 2008, and I’ve maintained it for the last 14 years religiously. I have automations setup so that ever facebook status, tweet, and foursquare checkin gets logged. I have emails that automagically get forwarded there for receipts and important events. I have my scanners configured so that I can scan documents directly into EverNote with 1-button. Everyone who knows me knows that usually within about 60s I can pull everything from old vision prescriptions to tax paperwork out of evernote with Ease.
Unfortunately, Evernote has been falling apart the last few years. Starting with the Evernote 10 update, which they switched away from Native Apps and instead into an Electron web app, things have gone downhill. It started with basic stability and usability problems, notes wouldn’t sync or they would just appear Blank for no reason until a restart. As they tried to work on it, more and more functionality was found “missing” because they removed all of their OS integrations. As a mac user, that meant I could no longer automate Evernote with AppleScript or Automator, and I could no longer search it with Spotlight.
Then a month ago I realized that the “Context” feature had stopped working. One key of my workflow had always been to open a note for a discussion with a person or a vendor, then use the Context feature to find previous conversions for reference. I thought it was a bug, but then I found out they actually removed it.. Silently. An exclusive feature only available to paid members, and they removed it. So time to find a new alternative.
Of course, now it’s been bought by “Bending Spoon”. I was already on my way out before this, but now it’s certain that I won’t be re-upping my subscription.
Notion wasn’t my first choice. At first, I honestly didn’t like it. It’s basically a Wiki in a box, which sounds neat but isn’t exactly what I was looking for. I used evernote as a “Haystack system”, meaning I threw anything and everything into it with minimal structure and used their OCR and Search features to find things easily. Notion doesn’t have OCR features, and doesn’t even allow API Image uploads (which means things like Rocketbook don’t work either).
I looked at Obsidian, which seemed closer to what I wanted and had a great ecosystem of plugins and tools. I set it up and played with it a bit, but for some reason it just didn’t fit into my workflow.
After a bit of fighting with Notion, the way they separate Spaces and manage Databases takes a bit of learning as an Evernote fan, I finally started to get into it. Which then begged the big question: How can I get my mountain of Evernote data into Notion?
My evernote system covers:
I have notes of all types: