David Allen’s Getting Things Done suggests getting things out of your brain and into a “trusted system.” For the past few years, I’ve increasingly used Evernote for that purpose. I have tremendous trust of Evernote. To the best of my knowledge, it’s never lost anything I’ve put into it, and the ability to retrieve in so many different ways, across all my devices, has been great!

Or has it? As I’ve taken more and more “out” of my brain and into Evernote, I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve gone too far. I no longer try to remember things, because I fully trust my system. My system does a good job for me. But what happens when I don’t have my system? I seriously wonder, do I still “know” anything at all?

I think highly of Evernote and will continue to use it as my trusted system. At the same time, I may want to be intentional about trying to actually remember a few things without having to look them up. Is that possible?