Remember everything.

The motto of the Evernote Corporation pretty much sums it up.  I’ve been using Evernote for a few months now, but the software came into its own a few weeks back during a Leadership session where we broke out into six different groups, each assigned to a chapter in the ASCD Book Curriculum 21.  Each group put together a hand-made poster of the main ideas on their chapter.  I decided to try taking snapshots of the posters for each group on my Droid smartphone in the Evernote application.  Within seconds the photos appeared on my laptop’s Evernote Desktop Client, ready for additional note taking as the groups discussed their chapters. Minutes later, the photos had been archived, and the hand written text was indexed and searchable.  .  .  Suddenly Evernote went from a potentially useful tool to a crucial part of my workflow.

[EVERNOTE.COM]

My use of Evernote garnered a fair amount of interest from my colleagues in the room, so I thought I would work for a while to make Evernote part of my daily workflow before reporting back (here) about how it is working.

Like any tool that relies on tagging and searching to organize information, I have found that Evernote works better the more you use it, and it requires some curation to keep your notes organized.

The Basics:

Currently I’m using the free version of Evernote, which has limitations to the amount of data that can be transferred each month, but as you can see below, I’m not such a heavy user just yet that I need any of the additional data features.  The only thing that would make this service worth paying for at this time is the ability to share and collaborate notebooks.  The free version allows you to share a notebook, but only as a read-only file.

What are you remembering?

So far I’ve found Evernote fantastic for a few crucial things, and better than some other options for others.

• Reciepts
  • I have a notebook called receipts, that houses any receipt that I need to keep track of, and then I organize within that folder by tagging the images (scans or email invoices can just be emailed to the unique email address that Evernote provides).  For instance, a search for 2009 and taxes reveals all the receipts that I need for those purposes.  Searching receipts for Warranty pulls up another set of results.
  • There are services that you can pay for that will scan and run OCR software on your documents.  I’m not in that deep, but it is a cool idea.
• Household repairs
  • There are always a few odd jobs on the back burner that I keep putting off.  Or if you ask my wife, jobs that I haven’t quite finished off properly.  I took a tour of the house on this snowy week off and took snaps of all the things that need to be done.  I can annotate the pictures in Evernote along with the supplies that I need, estimated cost of the job, and even update the progress of my work all from my phone.
• Blog posts
  • Having Evernote integrated into my browser means that anything that inspires me can be instantly noted without any hassle.  having these resources in one place means I can work within Evernote to draft out my ideas before fleshing them out here in the Worpress editor.
• Tournament Results
  • Evernote on my phone gives me a quick and easy place to note tournament results for the Speech team, even tagging the note with Geolocation data if I forget to note the location.
• Research & Projects
  • Once again, web research can be recorded and annotated within Evernote, which always saves the URL of the original source material.  It’s also smart enough to save either a selection of text from a page, or the text of a whole webpage.
• To-dos
  • A picture is worth a thousand words, a snap of something that needs to be completed serves as a great reminder.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.