Dynalist Ideas // Use Cases

I’ve been using Evernote since when it was still an endless “roll” of paper:

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For those with Evernote now it may come as a surprise that this free program did OCR locally, no web required, had permanent note links (not the GUID-based ones from nowadays which break when you export & import an ENEX file), had links to categories/tags, and auto-filtering, if you wanted it, to automatically assign categories/tags to notes. 10+ year later the new owners still haven’t been able to get feature parity with the program they bought and then replaced…
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The CTRL ALT N shortcut on Windows to make a quick new note has been my main way of journaling all those years. Lots of little notes “doing this”, “X goes to Y”, “X back from Y”, “Z called” etc.

I’ve tried to leave Evernote a couple of times but have so much diary/journal-like notes in there, so much personal stuff, that there is no ROI in moving elsewhere with that.

So… No journaling in Dynalist :smiley:

But apart from that? Everything. If it isn’t a journal-like update, it goes into Dynalist.

  • short term task list
  • projects list
  • brain dump
  • notepad/scratchpad

  • composing texts, from articles to letters → because outlining is the best way to write, and the ability to drag stuff around is powerful
  • bible study notes
  • checklists → winter/spring cleaning, packing lists, travel to do’s etc
  • information → clothes sizes for ppl I shop for, alt numpad codes, tax info, etc
  • how-to → if I look it up, I add it here. How to change the note indicator icon in Bonsai? How to fix the totally blank login screen for Google Photos Backup? How to do INSTRING in Excel?
  • research → going to buy XYZ but which? What’s the legal status on ABC?
  • recipes → I clip recipes to Evernote. Much faster. Anything I tried and like gets the tag “menu”. Every now and then I run a saved search “notebook:recipe -tag:menu” to find stuff I haven’t tried yet. When a recipe is a success I bullet list it in Dynalist. Much cleaner, much easier, and I get to edit the recipe right away. Some recipes seem to be composed to either complicate things (“stir the dry elements in 1 cup, stir the wet elements in another, add them together in a 3rd cup” …uh…no) or to sabotage you (“…then add the wet ingredients. … Before adding the wet ingredients, cool the recipe for…” oops, too late)
  • wishlists → I know Evernote is great for this too but a simple overview, a bullet list, of things someone has said they like over time…much more powerful

  • work queue
  • client information → who are they, what is their contact info, what did we do when, etc
  • people info → who is who? What’s their extension?
  • work wiki → if I have to figure out how to do it and it’s not about general software or how to debug a toaster oven, it most likely ends up here.
  • bookmarks/software → I come across a lot of solutions for problems I might have one day. I like to take note of them :slight_smile:
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