The headache of organising PhD notes (or how I stopped worrying and loved Evernote)

I started my PhD about 6 months ago, and during this short period I had to read a ton of papers, books, attend meetings etc. All these produce an immerse amount of notes, and its really difficult to keep track of them all in an organised way.

At first, I tried to tackle the problem by using a Wiki. This worked pretty well for a period: I could categorise my data, relate the data with an academic paper so I could build my library and create meeting minutes notes. However, it proved difficult (if not impossible) to have all this data offline and searchable. Not be able to use Mac OS X’s Spotlight is simply put: painful.

So I tried to move to document-oriented notes taken on Pages, but it wasn’t practical: no way to associate that with PDF papers. I also tried Papers, but then again it was not exactly what I was looking for. It was possible to add tags & notes on Papers, but what happens with the rest of the data I needed to keep in a library?

After some Googling around, I stumbled across Evernote. To sum-up it gives you 3 amazing features:

• Store anything: From PDFs to Images, Text, Webpages, Voice clips. ANYTHING
• Search on anything: Even on hard-written notes (apparently they run some OCR on the server-side, pretty neat). Spotlight works too!
• Organization: Organize everything into notebooks, tag them. Every word is indexed
• Available anywhere: On my iPhone, on my Mac, online and the best thing is that everything is in Sync. No more worries how to synchronise data or how to backup them efficiently

Its pretty easy to organise everything the way you have them in your mind. A few tips if you’re wondering how exactly I’m using Evernote for research:

• Notebooks for different tasks: I differentiate different tasks or projects and I group them on a notebook together. For example: I have a notebook for my PhD-related reading, a different one for a side-project and a different one for a topic I am reading on (e.g. Systems).
• When reading a new academic Paper, I just click the Safari’s link, and the PDF is magically copied into Evernote with its URL source. After reading the paper, and I want to append any notes on it (like a summary or crucial points) I just append them on the top. Of course, I always tag the paper: “Paper”, “Autonomic Management”, “Policies”. So when I want to get all papers on Autonomic Management it is easy as 2 clicks. Extremely handy!
• If I have a task or project notebook, I always have a principal Note marked as “To-do”. It lists all the pending tasks that need to be completed, per project readily available

If someone from Evernote reads this (thanks for a great product!), I have a wishlist:

• Collaborative notes!
• Ability to draw or take notes on PDFs and/or Images. This would be really handy
• Reminders or notifications attached somehow on notes (or the ability to sync with iCal do add a reminder)

And the BEST of ALL is that its Free!