I love taking notes and ‘ve always used them as ‘spark files’ – to capture inspiration. To borrow Georg Christoph’s words, as ‘waste books’. Over time, I’ve accumulated quite a number of them. And, as they grew in number, finding what I needed in them became difficult. And, as we moved digital, I started looking out for a good application that would scale up to meet my growing needs; an application to which I could throw anything that caught my attention – web-clippings, images, notes, pdfs, scans, etc. and which makes it easy to organize, find and search what I put in there. I googled and found one application solved this need for many – Evernote: a ubiquitous digital notebook syncing to the web and across devices.
We deal with lot of information daily and use number of devices to access it, from computers at home and work to mobiles & tablets. We add our two cents to the confusion with our own scraps of notes, to-do lists, articles to read, clippings to store, etc. and that too not in one computer. This chaos adds to our already complex digital lives. Given this scenario, what if we had one place to store everything? a repository, a notebook that captures everything and shows us everything irrespective of the device we are using? This is exactly what Evernote is. I’ve been using Evernote on my Mac, PC & mobile devices for quite some time now and it has now become my (organized) dumping ground for all things digital.
Two features make Evernote standout from the crowd – Input & Search.
- Input: Type notes directly, email (we get a unique email id to do so), scan & save, clip articles, drag files or photograph and save them, type quick notes (in the menu bar on mac), select sentences and right click to save to Evernote, multiple ways to get things in. And, all these items are stored as notes which can then be sorted into folders, tagged, edited, given comments, searched and exported.
- Search: From simple searches to searches for individual tags or notebooks to searching them together in one query with an option to save these searches for future use, evernote has it all.
If you check on the internet we can see people use Evernote in different ways: from saving recipes, managing tasks (including GTD), creating lists, storing photos, clipping web bookmarks, personal records, snapshots, recording audio, blogging, sharing information (via shared notebooks), storing business cards, scanning bills, keeping journal, to saving handwritten notes. My use of Evernote has been predominantly for research and in going paperless. I have a research folder where I save all my web clippings which I use as material for my blogs. Notebooks where I store application cheat sheets, self-help articles, interesting blog posts I’d like to read again later, tax documents, important emails, photos, scanned bills, receipts, handwritten notes, and training materials. I club topics with similar theme into notebooks and use tags to differentiate them specifically. Example: I have a ‘productivity’ notebook which houses all the articles I liked about productivity, and use tags such as omnifocus, GTD, time management to differentiate them further. If it’s a bill receipt, it’ll be in the ‘bills’ folder with the ‘what’ of the bill as tag i.e electricity or water.
There are very few software programs which become a part of our daily life, by becoming our extended minds. Evernote is one such application to me.
I initially started this post to write some tips & tricks on how to use Evernote, but, ‘realized that there are way too many websites offering advices on how to use Evernote, so instead of writing, I’m directing you to them. If interested in the software, please try the below links:
[…] my research, and wrote the story in Evernote. I had previously written about the software in my blog and it turned out to be a great place to write. Then, I used Scrivener to put the content into a […]