Using Evernote to Find A Good Everyday Carry Backpack

Goruck 0 – An Amazing Durable and Flexible Bag and My Favorite Choice

If you know me well, you know I like bags. Backpacks, briefcases, canvas bags, “hip sacks,” you name it. I’ve been known to hunt for a good sale, or clearance item to fill a bag need. For instance, I’ve had more than one Timbuktu bag in the last 15 years that I bought from Sierra Trading Post at a steep discount. More recently, I had a slight obsession with finding the perfect “Everyday Carry” bag for work. I spent a decent amount of time researching all the latest bags on the market, Goruck, Evergoods, Aer, Incase, eBags, PRVKE, Nomatic, and more. Through this research it became very obvious to me that following blogs like Carryology, and learning about bag materials, makers, eco-friendly alternatives, techie components is a serious guilty pleasure for me; that I’m here admitting it to the internet is another thing! But, I did a lot of research into some of the most recent and really cool everyday carry bags and I wanted to share it here in case there are any other bag nerds lurking nearby.

Here’s what I did and what I learned.

Using Evernote, my preferred notetaking app,  I surfed the internet using the search engine DuckDuckGo and captured all the bags I found interesting into Evernote (using the Webclipper) and then created a table of contents of all those “notes” into one master note titled “Backpack Table of Contents.”

After that, I created a list with everything I wanted/needed in a bag. I took some time prior to take notes of things I was looking for in a bag over the course of a few weeks, but then I summarized the key components into a list. I turned that list into a table in Evernote at the botton of that same note (see picture below). Evernote makes it really easy to make nice-looking, quick tables.

Next, I began reading and searching for all the bags I could find on the market that were being recommended by reviewers. There’s a whole Everyday Carry community online where I found many of these reviews . If you’re interested, two great places to get started are Carryology and Everday Carry. Then, as I found a bag of interest, I added it with the webclipper to my “backpack” folder in Everynote. At this point, I wasn’t necessarily doing deep research, I’m just skimming, trying to see what is the basic landscape, what is the language that people use to talk about different compartments and features, what are the materials, etc.

From there, I created a Table of Contents out of all of those different notes that went at the top of this one research note. Looking at the image above all those numbered items are the result of that Table of Contents. Those are each separate notes you can select and go into. The reason I did it this way rather than directly linking to each website from this note is largely because this is more expedient, capturing something with webclipper, then selecting 10 notes and hitting “create table of contents” and its done. No typing, no back and forth between various sites to get links, copying and pasting, etc.

The fourth step in this process was to narrow down my results and begin populating my table. I started with the the top bags that I thought would come closest to what I was looking for and began adding them to my chart. I’d add an image of the bag, the name, the cost, a link to it’s note or webpage, and then I would work my way down the checklist (to the left) of features I wanted/needed. This took a little time but it was fun andreally helped me to sort out what I was looking for, and disaggregate the important from the preferred. Here is how the note began to take shape.

Summary of Key Findings

What did I learn from this process? It’s hard to find a bag with everything you want in it. This is probably why many people have more than one! There are so many options out there and so many differences between them. As you can see from my research there are some that come very close to having what I want, but then they’re missing one or two key features, or the material they use isn’t great. But really my main takeaway is that there is no one perfect bag for everyone’s needs.

Second, a bag with a lot of opinions about how you use it is not for me. While I had all kinds of things I thought I wanted in a bag, it turns out that what I really want is one that is easy to pack and unpack, and can be used with different packing cubes, and other organization things.

A third is material really really matters. Scuffing, cleaning, zippers, etc. I bought one bag that I thought I’d really like, the Aer, and it looked really nice but the material had me contantly concerned that I was going to scuff it up. Add that to the fact that it had tons of pockets but not of them really fit with what I needed and I decided to return in.

Conclusion

After all of this, I ended up staying with the bag I already had, a Goruck backpack and adding some more organizational features like the Field Pocket, which offers plenty of extra pockets, uses the upper space on the inside of the bag nicely, and ties into the MOLLE straps inside the bag to (see the top photo). Add that extra little organizational feature gave it everything I needed, and I can take the Field Pocket out when I want to use my Goruck for overnight travel which I often do. In the end, I enjoyed learning more about all these different bags, how they’re manufactured, etc. and using Evernote to help distill down all that information into something useful.