Welcome to my first Full Disclosure post. I gotta be honest, I got this great idea from Kevin Mahan. He did a series of posts called Full Disclosure last year that were filled with great information. I’ve been wanting to write a few posts on how I use some different tools (separate from the Best Practices posts) and thought this would be a great way to make it happen. To start, I thought I’d hit up Evernote. Evernote is an app that I’ve been learning about and implementing into my workflow more and more each day. Recently, I’ve been getting a number of questions from friends on how I use it. So, let’s jump right in!
If you don’t yet know what Evernote is, check out this quick video.
How I Use It
I really use Evernote for a quite a few things. First, I rely on it for the storage and retrieval of creative ideas. I tend to find myself in a lot of meetings where I’m trying to come up with ideas. Most of the time, meetings don’t lend themselves to creativity. On top of that, creativity can be totally random and happen whenever. What I try to do when I come across ideas I find online or ideas that pop in my head is to clip them into a creativity notebook in Evernote. I do my best to tag the note with a few words that tie into the theme of the idea. That way when I’m looking for ideas for “teaching about money”, I can just type that in and see if I have anything saved yet.
The second thing I use Evernote for is ideas and content for my blog. When I’m disciplined I take some time to schedule ahead on what I’ll be writing about. (see image below) I’ll type that up in Evernote so it’s there ready to go. Also, if I come across content or ideas that inspire a post I’ll clip them in Evernote and again tag them so they are easy to find.
A third way I use it is to take all my notes from conferences or things that have made an impact on me and scan them into Evernote. Typically, I write everything into a Moleskine, even notes when I’m at a conference or meeting with a mentor. These notes are things I want to remember. So I’ll scan them into Evernote. The cool thing about Evernote is that it searches text in images as well! So, if there is a quote from a conference I can remember but not who said it, I can type it in search and it will bring up the notes I scanned in from that person.
Those are just three quick ways I use Evernote. For the sake of keeping this short I’ll stop there for now. The key to using it well is creating a system to organize it in a way that will work for you. Use folders, tags, sub-folders, etc.
How about you? Have you ever tried Evernote? If so how do you use it? If not, what questions do you have? Let me know below!
