You know how some obvious, everyday things just never click for you? For me, one of those was bookmarking in the browser. Bookmark lists are a black hole to me, into which great ideas get sucked, never to be heard from again. Part of the problem is that I use too many computers, with many different operating systems, and the bookmark I need is never on the computer I’m currently using. The other problem is that the content sometimes shifts (or the website dies) and whatever brilliance was there is now lost to me forever.
My gateway into Evernote was Web Clippings. I can copy the content from websites and email it to my Evernote address (or use the Web Clipper feature), along with the URL. I can access and search through that content from any machine that has Evernote on it. It has become my Internet Brain Storage Mechanism. If you’ve ever had that conversation that starts “I read this really great article” and ends with “but I can’t remember where it was,” you understand why this is awesome.
Pardon me if this starts to sound like a laundry list. Evernote is a fairly simple sort of app in concept; it’s just aggregating text, Web links, documents, photos and sound, but …holy cow, what can’t you do when all that information is available to all your computing devices? Add to that encryption and sharing, and its utility reaches epic levels. I’ll leave out the other Evernote integrations, automating it with services like ifttt, or creating searchable dictation, lest this article become a book.
Here’s a few things which I use Evernote for, in my personal life:
Here’s a few other uses suggested to me by a self-proclaimed Evernote Fanboy who uses it quite a bit for both home and office:
Evernote’s editor has all the abilities of a good text editor, plus a few really cool extras. If you have notes that make more sense together, you can merge them. On the mobile versions, you can add a location (you can add it on the desktop too, if you know the latitude/longitude). If you want to have that article read to you while you’re commuting, Evernote can send it to iTunes as a spoken track.
Once you have this incredible data repository, what keeps it from becoming another black hole? Evernote makes things very searchable and gives you a few different ways to organize your data. The two primary ways to group things is in “notebooks” (like folders), and with tags. You can even assign tags and notebooks within the subject line, if you’re sending content via email. If you have one notebook that has become unwieldy, or several notebooks that are related, you can put them into stacks. My recipe notebook got so big that I created a stack for recipes, and notebooks for different types such as desserts, drinks, etc.
Even documents and images are searchable, as Evernote has some basic OCR functionality. So, if you take a photo of a receipt or a business card, you can search through the text within that picture. PDF text searching functionality is also available in the paid version. And if there are searches you find yourself doing a lot, especially if it’s a more complicated search, you might find the Saved Searches option useful.
And just in case you don’t find enough here to solve all your life’s organization issues, Evernote is kind enough to include a shared notebook called User Stories. These stories highlight different ways people in various fields make use of Evernote.
You can get Evernote on the iOS App Store. The app is free, with optional Plus and Premium in-app purchases.
