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Comment by pkteison | Hacker News Reader

Meeting notes, shopping lists, todo lists, whiteboard photographs, names of people I've met at parties so I can remember who they are later, cigars and whiskey I've enjoyed.

Every other list maker I've ever tried has suffered from either local storage - it won't be with me after I flash my phone or if I take the idevice to the store instead of the android or if I'm at my computer and left my phone downstairs - or else poor searching. Evernote makes all my info show up everywhere I am and be very well searchable, so it's become my go-to 'jot something down' system. I particularly love that they did a great job on search.

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It is an awesome list maker. Almost perfect. The auto syncing and having an app for every device are the killers.

But, as a list maker, why can't I make lists in user defined order? This is one of the most fundamental things a list maker should be able to do. It's so painful it's almost a deal breaker. There is no more natural way to sort things into priority order. I need to be able to switch to different notebooks (and tags, potentially) and immediately see what's most important, but the only way to do that now is clumsy hacks and workarounds. I can't throw stuff in and iterate over it until it's a hunk of polished gold. Instead, I have to come up with a "system" to manage it all. It's frustrating. Dragging things into order is the most low-tech way of prioritizing work. I read recently that low-tech solutions appeal to geeks, so maybe that's why it appeals to me. The fact that you can't drag stuff into order forces you to over-engineer your approach to task management.

For now, I make lists inside notes, but then I lose much of the power that makes evernote useful in the first place.

"For flights, I store all my itinerary information, and also make a note of the parking location in a special note. Never forget that way. I have a note for all my emergency contact information. I have a notebook for date ideas for my wife and I."

Again, you could do this in simplenote /notational velocity. You're using a sledgehammer to do really simple tasks.

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