Software suffering

I have had an Evernote account for a very long time. It was my everything box for a number of years, and even though I did a migration out of it and into Apple Notes at some point I kept the account active because sometimes I simply couldn't find a thing in Apple Notes.

Last week I needed to find something from long ago in my Evernote account. Unlike the usual visits back there, which are usually akin to a trip to the attic to paw through that one box in the corner, I stuck around to see if I've missed anything. Any impressions I report here are coming from someone who has not seriously engaged with that app as a power user in a lot of years, but the thing that most surprised me was that it now very easily does things I'd wished it had very easily done years ago.

For instance, it has a calendar integration that works pretty well. My calendar inside the app is up to date, and there's an obvious button to click to make notes from any given event in the calendar.  It has a task overview that I used to have to cobble together with a canned query for any note with an unclosed checkbox, but now presents as a simple page in the app with a flat list of tasks, or tabs for by-notebook, by-note, and "Today."  Someone at some point enabled the Slack integration at work, so it's now pretty easy to turn a Slack comment into a note. It can watch a given folder and import things placed in there.

In my declining usage period years ago, I eventually got around to thinking that Evernote was  unfocused and  full of partially realized ideas with no connecting glue. Spotlight and a little discipline could, I reasoned, replace the digital shoebox parts, and I could leave notes, tasks, and calendars to other  specialized tools.

Well, that never really worked for me, and I found myself gravitating toward Obsidian and/or org mode for the notes and tasks part, allowed my calendars to remain on an island, and my paperless record-keeping went to hell.

Looking around Evernote this past week, it feels a little more simple and clean. It has lost some flexibility because the scripting interface is out the window, but the feature list is pretty good. It makes a good case for itself as a walled garden with only waist-high walls and the ability to connect a few things that bear connecting.

So because I found myself thinking "maybe I ought to give this a try again for a few weeks,"  naturally I wondered to myself, "but could you be doing this in Obsidian?"

And the answer is plainly "yeah, I could, and probably with more customization and flexibility; at the expense of needing to spend more time mixing the paste and sticking things together." In other words, with a lot of suffering. 

Not that fiddling, mixing paste, and sticking things together is "suffering." That's actually sort of fun. I mean suffering in a more classic Buddhist sense of craving things we think will bring us a sense of completion or wholeness. 

One antidote to that suffering is to foreclose on a few possibilities and rule a few things out. For instance, I'm blogging in Scribbles, which is defined by its foreclosure on the possibilities I was offered by Hugo, WordPress, and the two broad philosophies of website tools they represent. I thought Scribbles would feel like a straitjacket, but it honestly excels at what most matters to me, which is providing a place I can write a thing down and share it. I lost the ability to add features that I had with Hugo: No more automated picture of the week, no more automated old content warning, no more custom taxonomies, no more etc. etc. etc. Not even Markdown. But my satisfaction with the tool is pretty high because in exchange for all that stuff I can just start typing and stop typing and click "publish." 

When the possibilities—the "flexibility," or "extensibility," or whatever—are there, I'm going to seek them out. Given an Everything Tool held together with a plugin or self-extension ecosystem, I will probably try to implement every interesting feature I've seen in every other similar tool I've ever come across. In other words, I'll become my own personal world's most lousy, unfocused product manager, and my addressable market of one will suffer. 

So, "back to Evernote forever"? 

Mmmm. I'm uneasy with the idea of Evernote as the first and last stop for paperless stuff. I like its filesystem monitoring features because that's a built-in layer of redundancy in case/when Evernote beats me to the grave. I'm not hung up on my notes being impermanent, but do want the paperless stuff to not be subject to sudden disappearance.