The best way to keep your data clean & useful is to regularly do some easy tending and pruning.

WHY WOULD I LOOK AT OLDER NOTES?

Face it, when you started using Evernote you weren’t sure what to put in. Or you followed the idea of "dump everything in it" to the letter and now every search has way too many irrelevant results. Or you realize that your "how to use Evernote as a cookbook" period is over and you no longer need those entries.

Or you wish you would have tagged some notes. Or you would like to move personal notes to one notebook and article clippings to another.

An easy way to tend to this data household chore is by doing a search for notes created on that day in the years before.

Example: if today is December 28 then I can find the notes I made on December 28, 2009 by typing:

created:20091228 -created:20091229

The format there is since date, before date, and the result is a list of notes created on the since date only.

To view other years I simply change the year. My data goes back to 2005 when I started to use Evernote so it takes 5 searches.

I’m done with my data pruning in 1-2 minutes usually.

HOW I USE DATA PRUNING

• I delete a lot of material that is outdated or no longer piques my interest.
• See times gone by as I come across log entries.
  
• Add or remove tags
• Move items to new notebooks
• Consolidate notes, tags or notebooks
• Tweet older but interesting material
• See the big(ger) picture in areas of interest
• Get ideas for blog posts, articles

BONUS TIP: PERSONALBRAIN

I use the same pruning procedure in PersonalBrain. The reports tab lets you pick a start/end date.It’s a bit more clicking with the calendar it has but it’s pretty cool to have your data in order.

Think of a SmartBook as a Windows Mobile PocketPC with a larger screen and a near-normal sized keyboard.

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Twitter’s Ev thinks Twitter can help you overcome Information Overload.

That’s Sillicon Valley thinking. Information "overload" is a Sillicon Valley type of problem. Such problems are mostly a matter of choice, exist in a very small sub-culture — and have virtually no baring on the real lives of normal people. Continue Reading…

Mornings are pretty cool. I like to see the sun hesitantly flow into the day. I like the feeling of being “there” sooner than anybody else. And of course of getting so much done before the rest of the world starts their day.

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Not having an online presence is starting to be as odd as not having a telephone number at all. A “what’s up with you then?”

Besides the fact that it is just … odd … it’s also increasingly impractical. Like not having a car to extend the range within which you can work, not having an online presence is limiting the number of times you’re going to be accepted for a job.

Why You Have To Be Present Online

When nary the geek could get online and “do” HTML to make a web page, online presence needn’t apply to everyone.

When Geocities made What You See Is What You Get (sort of…) web page designers or when Blogger launched – you still didn’t need an online presence because back then being online was just that: being online.

Since the rise of social media and now social networking it has become: being online.

Nicknames & The Second Profile

Back in the day” we used nicknames. Remember? Online was dangerous and you needed to remain somewhat anonymous.

So when Jane would join a fishing board she would be “flylady18” or when John would sign into his parenting forum he’d be “DaDude” or something.

What we experience now is that by being online as ourselves, we have no privacy. The lady going to the beach while “sick” is spotted via Facebook and fired. The disgruntled employee airing via Twitter has made a company enemy for life.

So the next wave will be regular people maintaining multiple social networking accounts; one under their own real name and at least one other under an assumed name.

These nickname profiles will enable people to be themselves online without fear. To vent. To talk about books, songs, movies, artists, that are otherwise just “not done”.

They’ll allow people to be on vacation, post to their close friends and relatives and not have the boss expect them to therefore be in reach of the telephone and thus work.

See also:

• How to Quit Facebook Without Actually Quitting Facebook
• Should Employers Be Forbidden to Facebook You?

I love reading. Good books, great storytelling.

Movies. Movies too. From heart wrenching Sophie’s Choice to "must see again" Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

Oh and music! Let’s not forget about music. Sure, you might want to after you see me do a silly high-hat groove-that-bass move in the kitchen – but music sure does add that *snap*, doesn’t it? Right on…

And have you seen some of these articles? Some issues of the New York Times read like a monthly magazine – only it comes out daily! Hellooo!

All this stuff, all this content comes from somewhere; it’s made by people who need to earn a solid, reliable long-term living. Just like you.

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I’m a bit hesitant to say this but I blocked myself from Twitter and other (social) media snacking for 3 days – and I liked it.

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While ago I was playing around with inserting Adsense ads not somewhere floating before or after the content but in it.
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Geocities closes today. By the end of this day a lot will have been said about that closure.

Here’s what I have to say – from a social networking perspective.

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Sometimes, like during the Weekly Review, I like to have a hardcopy of the note list (the top pane in the Evernote desktop client).

There’s no native option to print the note list but don’t let that stop you.

I use a “scrolling window” profile in the screen capture program SnagIt to capture the note titles I want to print.

In snagit I crop the list to only have the title and tags columns visible; you might have your own preference.

The note font is quite small but before printing you can play with the page setup: stretching the image makes it more readable at times.

During the Weekly Review I print out two of these lists: one with personal to do’s/someday’s, and one with work related to do’s/someday’s.