Tes, I’m always honored to get tips and pointers from the more seasoned GTDers, so thank you for that.
As for evernote and reminders, I actually tweeted a corny tweet about a year ago to their CEO saying something like " alerts are to evernote as peanut butter is to jelly" or something like that! I've yet to receive a reply from him though (H'mm, I wonder why?!)

Because I moved my entire system to evernote I was forced to minimize my use of alerts and reminders since that had to be done through outlook. However, now I'm actually quite convinced that eliminating reminders from your system, other than your calendar, makes much more sense from a productivity perspective because:

a- The use of reminders in addition to calendared items obscures the truly important things that needs attention (this is the obvious drawback as David Allen frequently emphasis)

b- A more discrete, and arguably more detrimental, downside to using alerts particularly for action items is that it becomes a backdoor for ABC/Priority based flagging of actions.
When I was using alerts for actions I sparsely looking at my action lists and instead relied heavily on the action reminders I created (my thinking went as follows: if the action was important I would have flagged it)

So for now, I’ll stick to the tickler system (digital and physical) and see how it works out