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Episode Summary
A comparison of two task-management note-taking apps: Evernote and Notion. Learn the differences between the two apps and hear why Amy has moved most of what she does from Evernote into Notion. More importantly, she’ll share one big reason why Evernote has remained part of her workflow but in a more focused way.
Items Mentioned
Beyond Measure Podcast Episode 153: Cheers to One SIMPLE Lesson Activity
Evernote: An Independent Music Teachers Handbook Part 1: Studio Organization
Evernote: An Independent Music Teachers Handbook Part 2: Web Clipper
Evernote: An Independent Music Teachers Handbook Part 3: Account Features, Tagging & More!
Save the Date! Organize Your Life Using Notion
Evernote Web Clipper (extension) for your browser
Notion Web Clipper (extension) for your browser
Support the podcast on Patreon
Transcript
Welcome to episode 105 of The Piano Pantry Podcast. I’m Amy Chaplin, a piano teacher who likes to nerd out on organization and productivity tools.
In 2016 and 2017, I published a 3-part video tutorial series on the Piano Pantry blog on how independent music teachers could best utilize Evernote – a note-taking app – to manage their lives and studios. I was a huge advocate for this app, even going through their community leader program, which has now been discontinued.
Almost two and a half years ago, I moved much of what I was doing with Evernote into Notion, a newer app on the market. Some of you may have heard me mention Notion informally in various places over the last couple of years.
Today, I’m ready to dig in with you and talk about why I moved most of what I was doing in Evernote into Notion. More importantly, though, I want to highlight the one reason why I haven’t left Evernote entirely and how I now use its best feature in a more focused way.
Before we dive in, though, I have a random teaching tip to share with you. I had to be sure and share it THIS week because LAST week, my friend Christina Whitlock did an episode on one simple lesson activity she likes to do. When I heard her talking about it, I was like, “Ah! Yes, I do the same thing but with a slight variation.”
The activity is to play through several pieces and have students rate their feelings on the piece – how much they do or don’t like it. Kids have a hard time sometimes expressing what they think about a piece, so Christina gave them simple words to write down: “Yes, No, or Meh.”
My variation is to use hand gestures – so I tell them to give me a thumbs up if they really like it, a sideways thumb if it’s OK, and a down thumb if they don’t care for it. This has worked great, and the kids enjoy communicating with me in this way.
I think both versions of this would be useful in different ways depending on how many pieces you’re presenting and how many students you’re doing it with at once.
Thanks, Christina, for prompting this tip!
Now, onto our chat on Evernote vs. Notion.
Let’s start by comparing some of the basic facts on these two apps, including access, age, and price.
Both of these apps are organizational, note-taking, and task management-type apps. They are cloud-based, meaning you can access them from multiple locations, including your web browser, from a desktop computer app, and on your device – that is, a tablet or smartphone.
Utilizing a tool like this for daily life and business management is important for that very reason. It’s 2024, and we need to be able to access things from anywhere and not be relegated to only having things on our home computers.
Evernote has a lot more history, as it’s been around for almost 20 years. Notion has only been in the market for around 5. Being a newer product, I think it launched with a slightly more modern approach to organization. While Evernote has made updates, its default organizational system still works for the most part as it did 10 years ago.
Pricing is one point that is quite noticeable in the divide between these two systems.
Evernote used to have a fairly generous free plan as far as space was concerned. The limiting factor was that you could only access it from two places, like a desktop and an iPhone. I think that has since changed, and while you can access it from anywhere, the new free Evernote only gives you 50 notes total, which is not a lot, in my opinion. It really depends on how you’re going to use it. The first tier of payment to use Evernote is almost $11 a month, so I would say it’s lacking in a good midrange cost. The first pricing tier used to be in the $6-8 per month range.
Notion is generously free until you need a place to organize a team – which most of us as teachers don’t. Free speaks pretty loud to us as Independent business owners, which makes Notion very appealing.
Let’s talk next about the general organizational schema (skee-muh) between these two apps. I was reading a little online about others comparing these two apps, and one term that stood out when comparing is generalization vs. specialization.
Evernote’s organizational schema is very generalized and has always been around notes and notebooks. Notes exist inside of notebooks. So, you might have a Notebook full of notes for your home studio, one for your personal household management, and one for your University job.
It used to be that Notebooks stood as their own entities, meaning if a note existed in your “Studio” notebook, and you went to use the search function, Evernote wouldn’t search everywhere; it would only search inside of one notebook at a time. I don’t know when, but luckily, that has since changed, and you can search your entire account at once and not just inside certain notebooks.
The search function of Evernote is actually quite powerful and is one strength it holds over Notion. By strong, I mean that Evernote will literally search the text inside PDFs as well as handwriting. So, if you take handwritten notes on a conference handout and then scan that handout into digital form to save in Evernote when you use the search bar to search for a keyword like “scales,” it would find that word even in your handwritten form and thus find that note for you. Notion isn’t quite there yet in those regards.
Besides Notes and Notebooks, the next layer of organization in Evernote is to use its tagging system. This is something I blogged about years ago and still to this day love using. When you tag a note, you can tag it with multiple things.
Let’s return to that imaginary conference session I mentioned where you uploaded the handout from a session on technique. You might then tag that note with a tag called “conference sessions,” or you could also be more specific, “2024 MTNA Conference,” and then also tag it with “technique,” “intermediate students,” or “goals for 2024.” Then, that note will show up without being duplicated when you visit each of those tags. Tags are like labeling things for different aspects of that item.
The nice thing about relying on the search and tagging system is it alleviates the need to create all these ordered and organized Notebook. I actually always just used one notebook. As long as you have properly titled and tagged your note with keywords you would find yourself using when searching for it, you don’t have to worry about organizing – you can kind of let it go but still easily find things using the tags.
OK, so as far as the search function goes, Evernote does have a bit of a heads-up there.
Evernotes organizational structure, though, is very simplified and generalized through the use of notes and notebooks. There are not a lot of options for customization, which is where Notion shines. Notion doesn’t have a default organizational schema – you get to define a structure that works for you, and it doesn’t have to be the same for every page or note you create.
Notion is built around block editors. You can drag those blocks around to create highly custom visual workspaces. Now, when I use that phrase, I’m afraid it’s going to sound hard and scary, but it’s actually not; it’s really quite easy once you learn some of the basic block times and movement. You can create checklists, Trello-style Kanban boards, calendar views with databases, and more. It can be as simple as you like or a visually beautiful page that can almost look like a webpage.
While Evernote is a good for simple note-taking and capturing information (which I’ll talk about more here in a second), Notion is better for building an overall management system. This is why I have stopped using Evernote as my main organizational tool and now use Notion. While I could save information and create notes and lists, it was hard to see big picture things and just wasn’t very visually appealing. I am a very visual person, so when I saw the beautiful visual organizational structures I could create, I didn’t give it a second thought.
Notion is where I plan an organize all of my podcast episodes including tips, mailing addresses for guest host gifts, email text I copy and paste when inviting teachers on for interviews, track ideas for tiny tips, and more.
I organize details for my retreat and digital organization coaching sessions. Tracking things like cost, scheduling, attendee history, attendee surveys using a forms database, verbiage I use on social media posts from one marketing time to the next, and more.
I have a page for mentoring I do with Big Brothers Big Sisters. After I meet weekly with my lunch buddy, I write down what we did that day, important things I want to remember she told me, ideas for activities we can do, and more.
For my studio, I track all of my student’s information in a spreadsheet-like database that’s connected to an online form. When students fill out the form, the information automatically gets sent into that database. That, combined with moving all payments to auto payment through Coinhop, means I have ceased paying for a studio management program.
I could go on and on with examples of how I’m using Notion to organize my daily life, but for the sake of time, I hope those few examples give you a good idea. While I still have to share with you the one thing I do still use Evernote for, I first wanted to let you know about a big event coming up on March 8th and 9th that is designed to help walk you step by step through setting up your own organizational work structure in Notion.
My friend Joy Morin from the Color in my Piano blog are teaming up, and believe me when I say, this is going to be a high-quality event. You will get a sneak peek at some of the pages and structures we’ve designed over the last few years. You’ll be walked through the process of recreating pages and templates that we design that we believe will help you in your daily workflow. There will be options to get extra support or to take things further, learning how to use databases that connect to online forms like Google Forms, and more.
If you are tired of having your life scattered everywhere and would like to have one digital space to organize multiple areas of your life then this event is for you.
Registration will open up in early February so keep a look out for details.
OK, so let me double back here and do another recap before I highlight the one feature that I’m still Evernote for.
When comparing these two apps, Evernote is more focused on note-taking and has a set generalized structure around text-based notes and notebooks. While you can include things like images, links, files, to-do lists and more inside of a note, there isn’t a lot of customization you can do to the overall workspace itself. If you like keeping things simple and just having basic note lists then Evernote may be the better choice. Keep in mind that the free version only allows 50 notes then it goes to $11 a month.
Notion is a lot more visually driven. Rather than building what’s called a “note,” you build a “page.” Drag and drop movement of these pages allows you to create custom workspaces. Yes, you can do note taking in Notion like you do in Evernote. You can save images, files, links, and create lists inside of pages just like in Evernote, but rather than just looking like a basic text note, you can create workspaces using lots of different visual and colorful elements.
The only thing that I have yet to move out of Evernote into Notion is what I call my “brain dump” or my “idea capturing.” Evernote and Notion both have extensions you can add to your internet browser that all you to clip bookmarked links off the internet and save them into the program. Evernote, though, takes this a whole lot further. You can clip images, take screenshots, select a whole blog post, and have it remove all the ads off the page, and more. The web clipper is a lot stronger and more customized than Notions.
Because of that, Evernote has remained the place where I dump things like articles, ideas, and content. Conference note-taking especially. I love that Evernote searches PDF file text and my handwriting so it is a nice place to upload all my session documents and take notes directly into during conferences.
That’s it though. I don’t even really use it much more on a daily basis. I used to have around 4,000 notes in Evernote and I have cut it in half. A lot of it is stuff I will probably never see again, but if I was wanting some ideas on elementary Halloween music, I know I can go search in my Evernote and find that recommended piece I clipped off the internet 6 months ago I wanted to remember.
That’s how I use it.
Who knows, in 12 months, I could be telling you another story, but that’s just how it is with technology. I know it’s hard, and I know that it’s constantly changing, but I have so much respect for all of you teachers out there that I see you making efforts to figure it out. It’s hard, it’s a struggle, but you’re doing it anyway because it’s just part of what we have to do these days to keep ourselves sane. Am I right?!
As we wrap up this last episode of January, I want to thank all those who support this podcast over on Patreon, including Laura D., who is one of my Insiders. Thanks, Laura for teaming up with me to help bring content to our community every single week!
If you are enjoying this podcast and would like to throw a little thanks my way, you can currently join for only $4 a month. If you would like a little more support and good stuff from me, you can join at the $ 7-a-month level.
For those insiders, once a month, we get together for an email power hour, and I always share one good tip for inbox management. Then, once a quarter, I present a special session.
Last quarter was focused on how to create your own content, and in our next session – coming up on the last Wednesday of February – I’ll be sharing a brand new session I’m debuting at the 2024 MTNA National Conference in Atalanta called The Wow Factor: Crafting Winning Proposals and Engaging Presentations. Visit PianoPantry.com/Patreon to join.
As always, if there’s anything in this show you would like the links to, you can find everything including a full transcript at PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode105
