Over the past few years I've been balancing software engineering with management as a Head of Backend. During that time I've faced plenty of challenges, but one has always been the hardest: keeping everything under control.

At some point I realized my brain simply couldn't keep up anymore:

• tomorrow I need to send the latest Java developer rates to the Sales team;
• next Wednesday is the deadline for backend estimations on a new project;
• I delegated a task and now I need to remember to follow up at the right time;
• ...and the list goes on.

That's how the chaos slowly builds up. Earlier this year I became CTO, and things only got more complicated. Before long I had reminders, notes, and to-dos scattered across Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Notion, and several messaging apps.

I've always admired people who keep their promises and never forget important things. I try to be that kind of person myself, so I'm constantly looking for better ways to stay organized.

I've always liked the idea of visualizing work as timelines. The closest thing I found was the Planner plugin for Obsidian, but even that couldn't fully fit the way I wanted to work.

Eventually I sat down and wrote a list of everything I wanted from such a tool. That's how my own timeline organizer was born. I've been using it almost every day for the past month. It helps me stay on top of important things, look back at past events, and understand how different situations evolved over time.

The screenshot shows a real part of my day-to-day workflow. I changed all the names and project titles, of course, because of NDAs.

By the way, how do you deal with this kind of chaos? I'd love to hear what works for you.

TL;DR: 16-year Evernote user (~16,000 notes, full GTD system) here. The new Claude MCP connection is the missing piece I’d always wanted — something that can actually think across the whole system. It doesn’t replace Evernote’s built-in AI; it sits on top and joins your notes up with your email, calendar, files, and the wider web. Use cases I’ve been running: literature triage, grant-idea matching, GTD reviews and inbox triage, project status reports, knowledge maps and dashboards, trip and meal planning, and questions that cut across life areas. Still early days, but there’s far more here than the first wave of articles covers. Happy to hear what others are doing with it.

Claude helped me draft this note (sorry) and the mermaid diagram, and then even created the note in my Evernote, here: Reddit post — Evernote Claude MCP: what's possible (r/Evernote draft)

I really want to sincerely thank Bending Spoons for this this and all the amazing and rapid developments and improvements. And please, now that I’ve had a taste of what is possible, it would be devastating for it to not eventuate, so please keep going with the MCP!

I've used Evernote as my main second brain for about 16 years. It has grown into a bit of a beast, somewhere around 16,000 notes, with an all of life robust GTD system within it, holding most of my life: work, research, projects, reference material, personal odds and ends, lists, all of it. The new Claude MCP connection takes it to another whole new, incredible level, and I wanted to share some of what it's been like, because the articles I've seen so far only cover a small slice of what's possible.

One bit of framing first, since I've seen people get worried about this. It doesn't push out Evernote's own AI. The built-in AI is good for working inside Evernote. The Claude connection is a layer sitting on top: it can read, search and write across the whole of my notes, reason over them, and reach out to things beyond Evernote too. So the built-in AI knows my notes, and Claude joins my notes up with everything else. Also, it doesn’t replace me. I know enough about GTD that it only works well and at its best if I’m personally involved - an AI tool doing (or pretending to do) everything is just not effective at all.

Here's some of what I've been doing with it.

Research and academic work

• Find every note tagged "study idea" (random brainstorms and more developed ideas in my "Someday" notebook) and line them up against a specific grant call. It reads them, groups them by theme, and tells me which are ready, which overlap things I'm already doing, and which are new.
• Work through hundreds of saved article-alert emails I'd dumped in a notebook over the years, pull out the papers, grab the details, and get them ready for my reference manager. That backlog had been quietly nagging at me for ages.
• Pull a scattered set of notes on one topic into a single up-to-date summary.
• Draft a section of a paper or grant out of rough idea-notes I'd never joined together.

Writing

• Take a messy brain-dump note and turn it into a proper draft.
• I wrote this post from my own notes, and I'll save it back into Evernote as a note I can link to.

GTD, reviews and getting unstuck

• Run my weekly review with me: go through the inbox, flag what hasn't been processed, list the projects that have gone quiet.
• Take an inbox I've fallen behind on and pull out the urgent and important next actions, weighted by what matters to me and what's live right now, using what it can see in my email and calendar as well. This one has been a real relief.
• Look across my projects and find the stale ones, the ones sitting there with no real next action, then either suggest a sensible next action or rewrite the vague ones into something I can do.
• Tell me which of my open tasks it could take on, and which ones I could let go of entirely.
• Grab one feasible thing off my someday/maybe pile when I've got a free half hour.

Maps, dashboards and the big-picture stuff

• Generate a map of all 16,000 notes. Themes, clusters, how things connect. Think Obsidian's graph view, except it doesn't stop at drawing the lines. It can tell me why two things connect and what's missing between them.
• Build those maps around whatever I'm chewing on that day, with no plugins to wrangle and no settings to fuss over. I ask, and it makes the view I want.
• Dashboards and reports off the cuff. One I had it put together recently was an interactive, clickable map of all my research ideas, sorted and tagged the way I think about them.
• Reports on how things have shifted over time. Trends across years of notes, how a theme has grown or faded, how my thinking on something has moved.
• Audit my own system. It compared my current setup against an old "how this all works" note and showed me what I'd changed and never written down, what had drifted, and where the mess had crept in. It also turns up orphaned tags, likely duplicates, and notes filed in the wrong place.

More use cases

Personal

• "What do I already know about this?" before a meeting or a catch-up, pulling together everything I've saved about a person, place or topic.
• Meal planning from saved recipes, with the shopping list sent off to my tasks app.
• Trips planned out of years of saved travel clippings.
• A book, film or restaurant pick off my own lists that suits the mood or the occasion.
• Finding the note I saved years ago but can't remember the words for, just by describing what it was about.

Work

• A quick brief before a meeting, built from past meeting notes.
• A whole project's notes boiled down to a short status update.
• Every action item scattered across dozens of notes pulled into one list.
• A handover or onboarding doc written out of accumulated project notes.

The joined-up part

• Questions that cross between areas, where a note about my values, a note about a career decision and a project note all bear on the same thing, and it brings them together.
• "How has my thinking on this moved over the years?" across a decade and a half of notes.
• Advice grounded in my own notes, so what comes back sounds like me rather than something off the shelf.

Why it matters to me

For 16 years Evernote has been my all of life system. The Claude connection is taking it to another level. It can read the whole thing, think with it, go and check the world when it needs to, and write back. And it isn't only Evernote now. With the other connectors, my email, calendar, desktop files and cloud files are in the picture too, so things that used to sit in separate boxes are finally linked up.

Still early days, and I'm finding the limits as I go. But "only scratching the surface" feels about right. There's a lot more in here than the first round of articles let on. Happy to swap notes with other long-time users on what you're getting out of it.