Where do you collect information, record ideas, save electronic receipts, save a great article…Between business and school, setting up conferences, gathering ideas, and keeping track of relevant news articles, things can become confusing.  You might print all of this and keep files in a cabinet – but this uses a lot of paper and leads to a major organization effort…A year or so ago I was in a meeting and someone introduced me to Evernote.  If you have not used this, you need to give it a try. I love this program, and find myself using it almost every day…here’s a quick summary of how I use it.

Organizational Overview

Evernote looks sort of like email.  It has folders like your email box, and several view formats so you can see it as folder icons or snippets that look like my email inbox.  You can set up as many categories as you need – which become the folders that will contain the notes you create.  In my set up I have some for business, others for school, and there are some personal folders as well.  Each “note” has a title which can be easily changed if you decide you need something easier to find later.  Then there is a tag field to allow for searching across folders.  It’s pretty simple to set up, add, and manage.

Web Clipping and Other Documents

For school or work, research has moved from books to web…at least for most of us.  Bookmarking dozens of pages creates a mess in your browser bookmark section, especially when you just need a short article, and not a site you intend to revisit over and over.  For instance, I bookmark my online banking site, my salesforce automation site, and the admin page of my web store.  But when I am preparing to speak at a conference, I gather news updates with Evernote.  When I see something i like, I click the elephant (which Evernote kindly places on my browser tool bar) and it goes to Evernote.

If someone sends me an email with important information I can forward it to my Evernote account as well.  For example, I have a folder called Medical-Personal.  My wife might send me a link to a site on heart health with an article.  I select what I want and clip it to my Medical folder.  Then my doctor emails me a lab report with blood work – it might be in PDF format, so I drag the PDF to my Medical folder.  I might have a hard copy from a doctor visit and use my printer’s Scan to Email function which emails a PDF to my inbox, but I am going to save it in Evernote (simply by forwarding it or dragging the PDF file). I can also save Word documents, Excel or even Power Point, or I can make a new text note simply by clicking the plus sign in my Evernote folder and typing an idea.  If I would rather record a voice note, I can do that too.

I can assign tags to each such as health, remedies, etc.  I have folders for different areas of my consulting and speaking business, and idea folder for new business ideas, a homeschool folder for general homeschool work and ideas, receipts and travel expenses, and a host of others.  It’s easy to search Evernote, so I can always find what I need.

Access

Evernote is a web application, as well as a desktop, and iPhone app.  My notes sync with the Internet while I am creating them, so they are online and accessible from any computer as well as my iPhone app.  That means, no matter where I am, I can pull up anything I have stored, and since it is synced with the online site, it is automatically backed up.  You can also set up folder sharing with others in your family if that helps.  And if someone needs something I have, I have print it or email it to them right from Evernote.

Cost

There is a free version – that’s where I started.  But the paid version allows for more file types and space, for $45/year.  Try it and let me know what you think.

© 2012, David Stelzl