I like to separate notes from journaling for precisely this reason. I have hundreds of notes in Evernote that I will never see again. They're invisible, as light on me as a feather. Yet they're also searchable, so they're available in seconds if I ever need them.
I have system of using "top" tags to define my working view for a project. Say I'm working on project Foo. At any one time I'll have about half a dozen notes tagged "foo-top." I can take any note from my past and bring it front and center by tagging it "foo-top" and then delete the tag when I want the note to disappear again. Say, for example, I want to see if CouchDB will be useful for Foo. I used CouchDB for a personal project several years ago, so I can search for my note of CouchDB concepts and commands, tag it "foo-top", and then remove the tag if I decide it won't be useful. It's a beautiful way of carrying around a lot of baggage without feeling the weight. It's nice that if I want, I can write down notes and thoughts about something without worrying that I'll clutter up my journal and make it unreadable, or worrying that I'm mixing up the wheat and the chaff. It's not like I spend a bunch of time rummaging through a bunch of junk to find what I want, forcing me to think carefully about what I record. I can record anything that seems like it might be useful later.
A journal would be nice to have, too, though. One note in each project serves as a journal of sorts, in the form of a quick summary of what I've done each day and a quick summary of what I expect to accomplish next. (For work, I find it more convenient to keep a single note for this instead of breaking it out by project.) Evernote isn't great for keeping chronological notes. I only use it because I haven't seen an alternative that is compelling enough to make up for the convenience of using just one program.
One thing I really wish for is a program that could automatically present me with a diary of sorts based on my note-taking. Versioning would be nice, too, so I could see how my notes evolve over time.
Nice. I’m going to think about using ad hoc tags like this to tame my monolithic orgmode hierarchy.
Is there not an API in Evernote to query the notes? Seems like getting the last few weeks’ worth, sorting, and dumping to html or pdf would go pretty far for your diary use case.
I have system of using "top" tags to define my working view for a project. Say I'm working on project Foo. At any one time I'll have about half a dozen notes tagged "foo-top." I can take any note from my past and bring it front and center by tagging it "foo-top" and then delete the tag when I want the note to disappear again. Say, for example, I want to see if CouchDB will be useful for Foo. I used CouchDB for a personal project several years ago, so I can search for my note of CouchDB concepts and commands, tag it "foo-top", and then remove the tag if I decide it won't be useful. It's a beautiful way of carrying around a lot of baggage without feeling the weight. It's nice that if I want, I can write down notes and thoughts about something without worrying that I'll clutter up my journal and make it unreadable, or worrying that I'm mixing up the wheat and the chaff. It's not like I spend a bunch of time rummaging through a bunch of junk to find what I want, forcing me to think carefully about what I record. I can record anything that seems like it might be useful later.
A journal would be nice to have, too, though. One note in each project serves as a journal of sorts, in the form of a quick summary of what I've done each day and a quick summary of what I expect to accomplish next. (For work, I find it more convenient to keep a single note for this instead of breaking it out by project.) Evernote isn't great for keeping chronological notes. I only use it because I haven't seen an alternative that is compelling enough to make up for the convenience of using just one program.
One thing I really wish for is a program that could automatically present me with a diary of sorts based on my note-taking. Versioning would be nice, too, so I could see how my notes evolve over time.