I use them both every day, but I’ve never been happy about how I get articles I want to save from Google Reader into Evernote.  My solutions have been either pulling up the actual web page from Google reader and then clipping either text or the entire article from the page or trying to highlight text within the reader and clipping it directly to Evernote, both seemed awkward.

The answer is simple.  While in Google Reader you can send articles via email and every Evernote account has it’s own email address that allows Evernote to capture emails that you wish to keep. So I’ve  started happily reading article in Google Reader and then emailing them to my Evernote account. Very simple and very cool.  The command for emailing from Google Reader is letter “e”.

Me? Kind of slow, but eventually I figured it out.

Your Evernote email address found on Settings Tab of Evernote website

Entering “E” while reading articles in Google Reader opens an email form, just enter your Evernote email address and send.

Oh, yeah and if the term “Ubiquitous Capture “  sounds overly pompous, it’s from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology for the place where you can trust that you can put everything important that needs to get done — it can be a notebook.

According to the methodology, your mind should be emptied of these “open loop” distractions of “to dos” by storing them all in some kind of “trusted system” that you can then organize anduse to refer back to all your tasks.

The “trusted system” can be a notebook or a PDA or something on your computer.

GTD-Free is a application that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and is a straight forward implementation of the GTD methodology and can be used as the trusted system and for organizing your tasks.

The workflow for GTD consists of 5 steps, each represented by a process in GTD-Free.  The Organize and Review steps are combined – and Do is called Execute (which sounds a little like the task is given a blindfold, a last cigarette and put up against a wall).

The basic idea is to do a “Collect(ion)” of all the tasks you’re carrying around in your head and “untrusted” systems (like stickies).

The next step is to Process the tasks by going from the top to bottom of your list, one at a time, determining  if an item requires action and then filing it, throwing it away or incubating it for later action.

Then the Organizing step determines the next action the item requires to complete it and organizing it so that it can be done when ready.  Reviewing the categories should be an on-going process done daily with a major review done weekly.

Do is pretty simply, when you finally start working on the items to get them finished.

GTD Workflow:

1. Collect
2. Process
3. Organize
4. Review
5. Do

GTD-Free is a great free way to begin to explore GTD and to find out whether it makes sense for you.  If you like it, there are scores of other systems to help you collect, process and organize your tasks.  We’ll be reporting on others of them here at Enquiring Mimes from time to time.

Download GTD-Free [via lifehacker]

Getting Things Done Resources

Wikipedia

GTD Dictionary

A Primer on Getting Things Done

Related articles:

• Advanced Guide to Getting Things Done in Remember the Milk [GTD]
• In search of a GTD solution