Evernote As A Neural Prosthetic

from note taking to knowledge building

What I mean by a “neural prosthetic” is a supplemental tool that aids your brain. Over the past year, I’ve found that Evernote fits that description fairly well, and that it aids useful thought in many ways.

The collection of items that passes your attention daily includes: Wikipedia articles, posts on HackerNews or other aggregators, research papers, interesting projects, videos, slide decks, contacts, places, receipts, etc. It’s a staggering amount and variety of information.

You can remember quite a number of items and if you train your memory that number will become significant. Of course, pen-and-paper or plain text digital notebooks are a good way to supplement memory. However in my experience, this isn’t enough. How can you reference ephemeral information (like web pages) in a concrete way? How will you recall a majority of what you learned two months from now? How can you improve the introspection and past-learning of future-you?

For me, this calls for a system that can persist a wide variety of information, that is accessible from every computing device, that has excellent search/tag/categorize functionality, and that I am willing to use everyday. Evernote is one such system.

Here’s an example of my notes about two hours of browsing around I did after work: