Me and Evernote

Tue Nov 13 23:17:16 2012 EST (-0500 GMT)

Long ago I promised myself I’d blog about <a href=”http://evernote.com”>Evernote</a> when I made more than 1000 notes. I broke that record on Friday November 9, 2012 so here’s a quick summary of what Evernote is and what I use it for.

Evernote is intended to help people remember everything. While I haven’t achieved that, I’m a lot closer.

Evernote is a desktop, phone/tablet, browser plugins and a web application that allows you to capture information from anywhere. The application also indexes all entries so that the content can be quickly searched, including any text in pictures – for example: whiteboards.

All these collected notes are synced to client/applications on almost any device that connects to the internet – as a lowest common denominator, there is evernote.com.

Evernote has a provision for tagging notes, but more importantly it lets you start new notebooks and sub-notebooks. I use this to collect notes about the kids, projects at work, my favourite beers and wines, and other notebooks – including some I’ve shared with others.

There’s lots of information on Evernote’s site, so instead I’ll share what I use to for:

At home and around the town:

  • Lists of things to pack, buy, collect and almost anything else.
  • Pictures of the various medicines and other records my kids have taken – both kids have their own notebook.
  • Planing and document projects around the house – including the summer’s minor fence project and last summer’s major patio project and year before that’s nursery project. The notes are important, but the pictures are handy to travel back and forth from Home Deport with.
  • Records and information about the cars and appliances.
  • I transferred my wife’s recipes etc. from an old laptop to all her new devices – I also have access to the this shared notebook and…. don’t use them.
  • Pictures and notes about my favourite beers and the wines in our cellar.

At work:

  • Taking meeting notes – with my fast keyboard and obstructing monitor, or with my slower but less intrusive mobile devices.
  • Taking pictures of whiteboards (which Evernote indexes and allows you to search through).
  • Documenting projects.
  • I have a 200 note plus notebook titled Linux/Unix & WebDev.
  • Lesson plans and post-lesson follow-up notes.
  • Sharing notebooks with colleagues through the shared notebook feature and individual notes via obscure URLs.
  • Forwarding E-Mails to my unique Evernote E-Mail address to keep important information or things like receipts for reference.
  • Collecting research with the web-cliper.
  • Scanning paper handouts to PDF and adding them to Evernote… so I can promptly lose the handouts and still have the information searchable.

Other uses include

  • Clipping articles with the web-clipper extension.
  • Attaching PDFs of eBooks.
  • A clipboard to copy and paste between devices.
  • Forwarding all of my software licence keys received through E-Mail to my unique Evernote E-Mail address.
  • I imported all of my Delicious Bookmarks.
  • Use IFTTT.com to save favourite Instagram images, and previously, tweets.
  • Drafting blog posts!

There are many more uses for Evernote I probably haven’t even thought of, and I encourage you to seek them out.

There is a certain level of commitment to switch to Evernote over your current system [or lack there of] but I hope I’ve made the case that it’s worth doing because it’s a better process and it gives one the “never forget” experience that the elephant logo suggests.

Screenshots:

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