Get Everything Done

For a long time I was a devoted user of Evernote for FV. Everything went into an Inbox notebook and I processed the notebook according to the rules of FV, using reminders to create the chain. For a while I even had scheduled tasks emailed automatically to Evernote (until I realized that I was on a free trial of the automated mail service AND Evernote put a lifetime cap on the number of emailed notes that basic users get).

Then a couple of things happened. First, the changes in the Evernote service. Second, I happened to pop in here and see the rules for FVP. I figured out how to make it work in Evernote, but it was clunky and required duplicating notes to re-enter them rather than just sorting by date updated. At the same time, my five-year-old laptop was having a really hard time keeping Evernote open all the time. So I made the call to go back to paper and just use Evernote as my digital filing cabinet (I am, in fact, composing this very post in Evernote on my phone while waiting at the dentist's).

I bought the cheapest notebook that would a) fit in my purse and b) seemed likely to hold up to daily (ab)use and started the list over. In the ~3 weeks since I made the switch back to paper, I've noticed several things:
1) FVP works really intuitively on paper. Right now I'm using the questionless variant because I find that keeping a question in mind distracts me from processing what I'm reading. (I have a one-linguistic-input brain.)
2) I'm more motivated to work on those high-resiatance tasks that can tend to languish at the beginning of the list if it means I'm going to get to remove a completed page from the notebook.
3) Evernote was getting in the way of actually working on tasks... I'd sort by tags depending on what type of work was most important and blah blah blah. This had crept up so slowly that I didn't notice until I went back to plain old pen and paper.
4) I've made a conscious effort to phrase entries as actions, which is easy to overlook when, for example, you save a Web page to Evernote to read later.

When I save something to Evernote that I want to read, I enter it on my list as well, and I have a “Check Evernote Inbox” task on the list as well, to catch things that are still there from when it was my main list.

So… that’s my experience with FVP on paper. I’m really happy with is and might try to keep track of cycle times for a bit just because data are fun.

Sarah, I agree: tearing out a completed page is really satisfying! Sometimes that little bit of extra motivation is just what I need to do that one remaining task..