First Impressions of Evernote Tasks with Stacey Harmon

Hello and welcome to Getting More Done with Evernote, episode 17. In this episode, we're going to be covering the new feature Tasks in Evernote. I'm your host, Ray Sidney-Smith, Evernote user since 2009, Evernote Certified Consultant, and I'm one of their Evernote Regional Leaders for North America. As you can imagine, I love Evernote, and with Getting More Done with Evernote, I hope to help you understand and love Evernote just a little more, at least in enjoy digital note-taking a little more with each episode. And so today I wanted to talk about the new Evernote Tasks that just released in early access to folks. It's going to be rolling out over time. We're going to discuss that. And to do that, I have brought back on the show Stacy Harmon. She is an Evernote Certified Consultant and a fellow Evernote Regional Leader for North America. Welcome to Getting More Done with Evernote, Stacy.

Great to be back.

So today what I wanted to do was cover kind of 3 pieces. One is talking a little bit about what Tasks is so people can understand that, covering a few of the features, and then talking a little bit about what Tasks currently is today and what it can be for people going forward. How users, general users, can just utilize Tasks today and perhaps where it is and maybe a little bit of conjecture, a little bit of forecasting for what Evernote can become. And so let's start off with what is Evernote Tasks? How do you see Evernote Tasks in terms of Evernote's development here?

Well, first of all, it's a massive day for Evernote. You know, this is like a big foundational change and evolution to the software that really, I think, has been in the works for 6 years, right? Evernote has wanted to add Tasks for the longest of time, and the fact that they couldn't do it as an excellent feature— like, they couldn't do it with excellence given the legacy Evernote structure— I think may be a key reason that we are here with this new Evernote and the path that they've taken. So it's quite an accomplishment. It's very exciting. And it's a beautiful first step in a feature that fundamentally changes what's possible to do with Evernote. So it's really exciting.

As I've said time and time again, as we have been making our way through private discussions, I have said that this is one of the most important changes that Evernote has ever made to the product suite. And you're absolutely right. This is a way for people to be able to make actionable what ends up being light reference or even heavy reference in their second brain, in their extended minds, which is Evernote. So if you're using Evernote for taking meeting notes, especially meeting notes is where I kind of see this practical component where if you're taking meeting notes like I do, I'm taking meeting notes in a meeting, I want to be able to grab the action items from those meeting notes and to be able to pull them together. So say I have 5, maybe sometimes even 10 meetings a day. When those meetings happen, I want to be able to take those notes, immediately identify what are actions, and then pull them all together to organize and contextualize what needs to be done. Especially for me, where I'm trying to identify the commitments other people have made in meetings that I don't want to track in my primary task management system. And so I really see some power here in how Evernote Tasks is going to move forward in helping people understand the actionability embedded within their Notes.

Well, I think you've hit on a conceptual idea that I think we should discuss, which is the vision of, of Ian Small is to take Evernote from this, this place where we can remember everything, which has for a long time been the focus of the company, to remember anything and accomplish anything. And this is a massive step towards that and a really exciting evolution for all Evernote users. So I agree with you that the note-taking, you know, when you're in meetings and the ability to capture capture that information and then have this new layer of how we view that piece, that information. It's kind of a new filter which we can view action-oriented steps, which are a natural extension of your note-taking activities. So it makes a lot of sense. And I think, and users are, I mean, the early feedback I'm seeing is a lot of excitement and finally and yay and it's beautiful and all of these things. So it's a good day for Evernote, future of Evernote.

And I've heard the same excitement and the fact that people can get excited about a feature that is new and illustrative of what Evernote can do now in this new codebase. We've been through a little bit of a dark period, so to speak, in the Evernote world because Evernote did have to make this big change between Evernote Legacy to the new Evernote, and it's still doing that, right? We still are coming back to parity with the old version, but we're getting there. We have import folders coming. I'm hoping very soon, and I know coming soon is now the— is a dirty term now, but they are coming back. And with Evernote Tasks, the other thing that I really think about when people are kind of starting to, as you said, kind of conceptualize usage of Evernote Tasks is thinking about this from the perspective that if I have, say, a PDF that I've emailed or somehow clipped into Evernote as a note, now I can be reading that PDF, and as I'm toggling through pages, I identify notes or actions that I want to take based on that, which is frequently what I'm doing, I can now be pseudo-annotating the document with the actions that I want to take based on the content in the Evernote note. So, there are some really interesting and, you know, curious ways in which I think people— creative ways in which people will be able to—

Love that use case and idea for for applying tasks to your workflows. I mean, that makes such good sense. And you can see how clearly it moves the process of accomplishing a step forward, you know? So yeah, absolutely. I agree totally.

So for folks who are looking for Evernote Tasks, it's going to be a little bit interesting because it is coming out in what they call early access, but it's being released to everybody in the Evernote ecosystem, minus a few people who are not able to see it in certain environments. I'm sure they'll clean that up over time.. But if you are running Evernote Desktop 10.15, Evernote Web Desktop 10.15, and then Evernote Mobile 10.11, and that's across, you know, all operating systems, you will see once you click up to those versions, Evernote Tasks appear as tasks, and then you'll see a little blue label that will say Early Access, and that will be and show you that it's available. Tasks will be available for everybody with all of their features that they're working on until they go into some kind of full public availability. And then, depending upon the version of the, the account you have with Evernote, Evernote Basic up to Premium or Business, it will depend upon what features you ultimately settle into having at that time.

I think that's a key point that I really appreciate Evernote being very transparent about. When you first see Tasks, they're going to give you a screen that says you have full access to Tasks during early access, but they tell you right there that certain features will be limited to specific plans or tiers service when it's officially released. So right now they're letting you, you know, get in, see how you like it, see if it works for your workflow. And I encourage everybody to dig in and test it out and see what kind of areas it has improvements are. I mean, I, I assume you agree with me that there will be some version of Tasks available on all platform or all service tiers, but you know, some of the future or to-come integrations may be the widget on the home screen, which isn't currently available, but they've clearly indicated is coming. That may and again, I don't know, but that may become a paid feature that premium users have access to. So, but get in there, use all of it and see what you like about it. Because now's your chance at no cost.

Absolutely. And so, so Tasks will have various new features that will be placed according to your Evernote plan. And at the end of all of this, it will go into, you know, what we call general availability or GA. And that's just public availability. And wherever it settles is where people will, will have those various features. And so Be mindful of the fact that you also cannot turn off tasks currently. And so tasks are turned on, and presumably they, just like, you know, any number of situ— you know, places in Evernote, you will not probably be able to turn off the feature completely. I'm hoping they give you an option to be able to maybe remove it from the left navigation menu. But the idea here is that you cannot turn it off while it's here in early access. So everybody has access to it, and everybody is available to use it in that sense, but you cannot turn it off. And so let's talk a little bit about the features of Tasks so people can kind of get a flavor of what Tasks looks and feels like in the system. And so what does a task look like in Evernote? Can you describe it for folks? Sure.

Well, the first thing is that there's a whole new what they call Kingdom, which is a Tasks area that you'll find in the left navbar. So we have a whole new button over there, which is major news in the Evernote world. And when you you click on that, it's going to, um, the other— well, I'll get to that in a second. That's how you can access all the tasks. But tasks really are a new type of content block. So in ver— in the new Evernote, we have the ability to insert into the note all kinds of different pieces of content. And now tasks is one of those content types that you can insert. And it looks a lot like the checklist feature where you insert it and start typing, and then when you top, tap the radio button, the radio button on it, it will strike through and complete the task. And the tasks button or kingdom on the left-hand side will give you a high-level overview of all your tasks alongside each other, no matter what note they live in. So that's— anything to add to that?

Yeah, so I think people need to understand this is working once you are upgraded to the latest versions, you are capable of adding and installing that task's component, that task object, in any note. A note is the container of tasks. They must live inside of a task note. And so your task will live inside of a note. And even if you create a task that's not assigned to a particular note, Evernote will automatically create a Things to Do note and embed that task in that note. So you're not limited in that sense. And once you do create it there, in the Tasks view, what you, what you call the Task Kingdom, where you click on the left navigation menu, click on Tasks, you're now going to see a dropdown pop out and that drawer is going to show all of your tasks across the entire Evernote account, which is just brilliant.

And, and I love it. And like an analogy, there's two things I think we need to highlight, but a good analogy that you might be able to grasp onto is if you're a tag user, you know how tags can pull notes from across different notebooks. Tasks can pull tasks from across different notes, no matter what notebook they live in. So it's really a new layer, a new filter to be able to put all of this actionable item information together. And then there's so much fun functionality in that tray, in that tasks tray, in terms of being able to reorganize tasks, add, you know, dates that are completed. We have a lot of options that you can kind of go deep into a particular individual task. So that's one element that we can take a deeper dive into. That's the feature set. But you hinted at this that I think is a really important thing people need to understand. Much like we have a default notebook, in Evernote where notes will go if you don't override that choice, which you have the option to do. There's a default Tasks note that exists or will be created if you don't proactively put a task into a specific note. So if you can't find your tasks, go to your Task Kingdom and look for that default note, which is, as Ray said, Things to Do, and you'll see it there. And then you can move them around as you need to.

And so purple ends up being the color of tasks throughout the system. And I really like this choice here because no matter where you are in the system, you can see that purple indicator and the purple just lets you know that you're dealing with tasks. You're, you're instead of a gray square for checklists, green squares or rounded squares for checkboxes. Now you have a purple circle, and that identifies a task. And so you have lots of different spaces inside of Evernote where you're going to see purple appear, and that's going to be those things that are tasks. And so it's really helpful. As you noted earlier, you have the ability to sort, filter, and search. There's actually a search box in the Tasks view that gives you the capability of being able to search the system, which is just great. I hope that they really level up the search components there so that we have some greater capabilities within the search fields that are given to us. And we were actually given quite a number of different types of flexibility within tasks. We can label something by flagging it as important. We can give it a due date. We can give it several reminders. We can give it a description, of course, and, and then we can also apply some level of information around that particular task directly in the note if we want more. So you can, for example, you know, identify a task and then above or below that task provide additional notes or context around it. It doesn't live with the task, but because it's inside of a note, you can put those— that information directly with it and be taken to the note at any given time. You also have the ability to switch where a note lives. So for example, if you're in Tasks view, in every, every note where a task lives, you see the name of the tab, the note, and you can actually just drag the task between those notes, which is really, really helpful. And just like any checklist, you can reorganize the checklist so you can move any particular item up or down in an order of those particular tasks. So very, very helpful for being able to do those kinds of things. I've been pretty pleased with the ability to click on the various sorting functions by note, title, by due date, and then those that are flagged as important. And some, some other really like fun features that they've added in is that you're actually given the preference to be able to view whether or not a note is completed or not, a task is completed or not. So you can see all of the completed tasks in line with your tasks in task view, or you can have them basically disappear. And you also then have the option to say, I want to take these tasks and turn them from complete to incomplete again, which gives you a little bit of the recurring— like say you have a checklist of items, say the gutters need to be cleaned every season. Well, you can have a checklist of all the things that need to be done in order to get yourself ready to go clean the gutters, right? Like go get the ladder, maybe you have to rent a ladder, maybe you have to go get the hose extension, blah, blah, blah. All of these various things, you can have that checklist and then each season you're just basically going to reset the list of checklisted items, of task items to uncomplete or incomplete, and then you go ahead and you can check them off as you complete them again. So some really thought has been put into how to manage some of these pieces and I'm really pleased with what we have so far. We are Evernote power users, and of course we are never complete until Evernote is adding new features to our feature set. So this is not the end of Evernote Tasks. This is the very beginning. This is the starting line. What do you feel like is missing in Evernote Tasks, Stacy, and where do you think Evernote is going to go with Evernote Tasks? I know this is a little bit of conjecture, a little bit of forecasting, but I think it's fun to think about. About what could be the future of Evernote Tasks?

Well, I think the first obvious one we've already mentioned is integration with Home, right? So we have this beautiful dashboard and we don't have anything other than the ability to display notes that have tasks in it on Home currently. So they certainly discuss how that in the forums, you know, the product managers are saying this is in queue, that kind of a thing. And I also have seen in the beta discussion a lot of talk about recurring tasks. And the need for recurring tasks. So I think once we— I can't imagine that's not on the roadmap. In fact, I think I feel like I've seen that in the public forums as well. For me as a power user, I'm looking to see data tied to like note links or other actionable items tied to the individual task items. Currently we don't have that functionality. And in the way I use, you know, to-dos inside of Evernote, which I've always done all my task management inside of Evernote. So this is certainly something I'm very interested in. Very interested in. That is an area I'd love to see some additional improvement. So I actually have actionable related information, you know, can I click on it? If my action is, is to book my flight and I've already clipped like some information about that flight, I'd like to be able to hyperlink to that. So for me, that's, that's what I'm interested in, hopeful that we'll see over time.

Yeah, just like a note has a URL field, if you, if you don't know this, if you click on the actions menu, that more options ellipsis icon on any note, you can drop down to the menu, click on note info, and then when you open that up, there's actually a URL field and you can place any URL you want there. Typically when you clip something from using the Evernote Web Clipper, it automatically grabs the URL of what you clipped from. And so that field, you could put anything in there. I kind of want that. I, I think that's what you're talking about here in Evernote Tasks. In that task field, I'd like to see an option to say, maybe it's an advanced option, to pop open a field to put a source URL because many times what we're trying to do is something out there on the web today. I want to be taken someplace like a Google Drive document or something like that where I want to, I want to be popped out to it to be able to add, but I also maybe want to link another note that is in my system.

That's what I want. I mean, I'm using note links in my, in my checklists a lot. So I lose that functionality if I convert my checklist to a task list.

Right.

And currently, just so people have an understanding, when you're in tasks, the description does not hyperlink any links that you put into it. So it is just of static text in that box. And of course, I'm sure that will eventually be looked at and upgraded over time. My big thing that I want in Evernote Tasks is tags. I want to be able to grab from the rich source of tags that I've created in my tags kingdom and use that now in the tasks kingdom. And so, T-A-G-S versus T-A-S-K-S. And so, I want to be able to grab those tags and be able to use them fully because then a true and not necessarily true, but an easier Getting Things Done or GTD implementation can be created by virtue of being able to tag those tasks and source those tags and search by them from within the Tags View. So the Tasks View, Tags View and Tasks View. But I think that it's going to be really great if we see some version of that come into play. And I'm really excited about seeing what Evernote can do in that. I also would love to see what Evernote is going to do with the API and exposing those fields of tasks to the API, because imagine the, the Zapier and IFTTT integrations that you can do and all the workflow automation you can do if you can get Evernote tied to other things.

I was actually talking to a workflow automation software team yesterday, and they're building out hopefully what will be a connection to Evernote in the future. And I was really excited to hear about what they're doing, but then I said to them, by the way, today they announced Tasks, and make sure that you spec out the components of what you can do for, say, synchronizing all of your tasks between Evernote and other major project management software. So, this is really going to unlock the doors if we can get API access as soon as possible into the hands of developers. So, I'm a little bit more bullish on that component than—

I'm very optimistic that that's I mean, Evernote's always been a leader in offering an open API. So this is a very exciting development in terms of that. So I think you're dead on being excited about it. I hope we see that soon. And I can't wait to see what third-party providers end up doing with that.

It's so exciting. Oh, it's going to be amazing.

I'm really excited and I'm not one for hyperbole. And this is just one of those cases where Evernote has really thought through what the future of that accomplish anything is going to feel like in the broad sense. And in our next episode, I'm, I'm actually going to interview Jack Lynch, who's a product manager at Evernote for tasks. And the sense you will get from speaking to anyone on the Evernote team is that they are listening to user feedback. They're listening to Evernote users like you and they are using that feedback in their research and design and development choices when it comes to product. And so we have a voice in the future of whatever it will do. And so I really encourage everybody to try Tasks and tell them what you think of it.

Well, and I completely agree with that. I think that's the real story of version 10 and the new Evernote is I feel like they are listening to what users say. And to your point, and maybe you can add this to the show notes, there is a dedicated forum in the discussion area that they have said, hey, here's where we want your feedback on Tasks. So anybody can post there and get some ideas and agree with other users or get ideas from other users. It's a really powerful way to have your voice heard and influence the direction of the feature.

Fantastic. Any final thoughts for folks regarding Evernote Tasks, Stacy?

This is just a great day. I'm proud of the Evernote team for it. I'm excited to get into what this offers Evernote users and how this evolves the platform. It's really a great step and I'm thrilled to be I'm so happy to be here talking about it with you. Finally, you know, finally. And it, I think the other thing it's really doing is reiterating the trust that we can have in the fact that this is new, the new Evernote offers fast releases. I mean, they're releasing, if you count, tally it up, it's quicker than every 2 weeks, we're getting iterations here. And I really do feel like this is just the foundation. This is just the beginning to back to Ian's blog posts from even a year ago or before that. Starting line. And you started saying that in the beginning. And so I think there's a lot to be encouraged and excited about here.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Stacy, for joining me here on Getting More Done with Evernote.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Of course. That was Stacy Harmon, Evernote Certified Consultant, founder of Harmon Enterprises, and of course my fellow Evernote Regional Leader for North America. And so that's all for now. If you want to learn more about me and what I've got going on, head on over to gettingmoredonewithevernote.com. I'm Reese Sidney-Smith, Evernote Certified consultant, and here's to your productive life.