Peace of Mind Organizing

How I use Evernote

8 June 2015

A year ago, Springpad, the online digital organizing system I’d been using, went belly up. Fortunately, all the notes and notebooks I’d created in Springpad were transferred to Evernote, a similar, less graphical product. But I was sad.

I had created an account in Evernote years ago, but resisted using it. I know that part of my resistance was that I didn’t like the user interface. It was ugly to me. But, happily, I’ve been able to get rid of the ugly green and work in shades of grey in the desktop application. For whatever reason, this has made a big difference for me.

Springpad got me hooked on having an online place where I can store notes and websites. The critical component was that it synchs effortlessly among devices. Evernote has that same attribute. I can access my notes on my MacBook, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch.

I’m happy to say that I’ve finally embraced Evernote and use it on a daily basis. I’m not an Evernote power user by any stretch of the imagination. There are many, many features to Evernote and I don’t think I’m even scratching the surface. But I’m not letting the fact it is so feature rich let me feel intimidated or overwhelmed.

I thought today I’d share with you how I use Evernote, in hopes that it might give you the push to need to use Evernote (if you don’t yet) or to help you improve your Evernote experience. So here we go. I use Evernote to:

• Organize my team organizing jobs. When I’m putting together an organizing team, I use Evernote to keep track of who I’ve invited and who has confirmed being on a team. I might also make checklists of projects to be accomplished on the job, or about client reimbursements. They key is that I can access that information on my phone on the client site.

• Keep track of blog post ideas. I tag posts with the word_ written_ once an idea becomes a blog post. Then I can search my Blog Post Ideas notebook and exclude those with the tag written.

• Organize my travel. I forward itineraries to Evernote via email so that I can easily pull them up on the go. I can also keep track of hotel information and even hotel ideas when I’m deciding.

• Keep track of the books I’ve read. I have a goal of reading 52 books this year. (I mostly read fiction.) When I finish a book, I create a note in the Books Read in 2015 notebook, recording the name, title, and date finished. I don’t know why, but this makes me happy.

• Take notes during meetings. Because of its robust search capabilities, Evernote is a really handy place to take notes (and easily find them). I keep those notes in a notebook related to those meetings (for example, NAPO-St. Louis).

• Create virtual sticky notes. I keep a few facts that I might want handy but haven’t memorized in Evernote for easy access when I’m on the go. Examples: My library card number, my NAPO membership number, my TSA Known Traveler Number.

• Clip interesting articles from the web. The Evernote web clipper is a really easy way to keep track of articles you see on the web. You can tag as you clip, which makes it really easy to keep clipped articles organized. (I find it much easier than using bookmarks.)

• Log my genealogy research. I’m still refining how I keep a research log, but at the very minimum, I try to record the simple details of my research sessions in a bare bones template I’ve created for Evernote.

I’m giving serious consideration to copying all my electronic genealogy documents into Evernote so they can be tagged for easy retrieval and available on all devices. That will be a large effort and I haven’t yet committed. But if I do decide to go that route Evernote will become even more valuable to me.

One reason I like Evernote so much is that I can find things on it so easily. I also really like that it automatically synchs between all my devices. The icing on the cake is that if I were to find myself without any of my devices but had access to a computer (like at a library or a friend’s house), I can simply log into Evernote on the web to see my stuff.

I’m curious: How do you use Evernote?

Tagged with: evernote, productivity, task management, technology

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