How do you organise your Evernote tasks?

Tasks are one of the features I’ve been waiting for since the beginning of time!

Literally no other app has been able to properly integrate tasks and notes and have them work smoothly. I’ve used a stupid amount of note apps and systems over the last 20+ years and I think, finally tasks and notes together has been cracked by Evernote.

The concept of a task

Evernote comes at tasks from a slightly different perspective to the usual task manager app.

The note is the main entity with tasks being a part of a note.

With more traditional task managers and to do lists the task is the main entity with notes belonging to the task.

The Evernote perspective works well for me where I can connect a task with a project note, client note or just a task list note.

How many task notes do you have?

The way I organise my tasks is that I have two main task notes:

Work

Personal

These two notes hold the bulk of my generic tasks. Things like “Take the bins out” for my personal task note or “Backup CRM” for my Work task note.

I then have notes for my clients and projects and these hold tasks.

For example, I’ve been moving someone’s online store from one domain name to another so I have a task in the main project note called “Move shop”.

This note then holds a long checklist of all the things I need to do to complete “Move shop”.

Other client tasks could be something like “Email report”.

The great thing about how Evernote manages tasks is that it unifies all these tasks into a Task Sidebar and also Home Screen Widget so you can see exactly what needs to be done each day.

Managing tasks quickly in the sidebar

Open the task sidebar using the keyboard shortcut ALT+CTRL+3 on Windows or the Mac equivalent.

HUGE tip for your workflow, you can reassign the shortcut to whatever you want by clicking the keyboard symbol at the bottom left of the desktop app and then search for the shortcut and reassign it.

I use Ctrl+ Num Pad 0 to open mine.

When the task sidebar is open you can search for tasks, filter them by things like date, recurring, completed and more.

You can also quickly view tasks in a different way like just ‘your tasks’, ‘assigned tasks’, ‘notes with tasks’ and ‘view by due date’.

Due date is the one I use all the time. I love to be able to see what’s happening today, tomorrow and the week ahead.

So my workflow for adding a quick task is to use my custom shortcut and open the side bar, the due dates view is usually open and then I add a quick task.

How do you add tasks quickly?

The home page task widget

Another huge productivity boost for me is the task widget on the home page.

I have my home page set to open when Evernote opens so the first thing I see is my calendar and tasks. To be honest, I tend to hit the home screen a lot during the day and check off most of my tasks from the widget.

One cool thing about the widget is if you use the largest version you can see the note that holds the task, click it and you go straight to the note. Very useful.

Do you use the task widget?

Improvements I’d like to see

The current implementation of tasks pretty much covers me for viewing, sorting and checking things off but there’s a couple of niggles.

I’d love to have a ‘bulk select to postpone’ feature. I usually end my day with 4 or 5 tasks that need moving to the next day and right now you need to open them one by one and change the date. It would be great to select a bunch in one go and move them to tomorrow or another day.

I don’t tend to view my tasks on the actual note very often but when I do it would be nice to hide completed tasks or the note can get very long. It would also be nice to move completed tasks to the bottom and reorder tasks in a note by date.

One more niggle, when you click the name of the note on the large home page task widget it goes to the note but the task pops up on top of it so you have to close the task to get to the note.

To be fair, tasks are only about a year old so I would imagine there’s plenty more to come.

How do you task with Evernote?

I’m always interested to here how folks use Evernote so find me on Twitter or LinkedIn and let me know how you task.

Have a good weekend.

All the best,

Jon