I’ve long been better organized electronically than I ever was with dead trees and paper so Evernote was a natural application for me to adapt to organize my notes and research. It has become a go to application of sorts for me because I centralize so much personal, professional, and especially project information within various Evernote notebooks.
Here is a overview of how I made the move into Evernote:
Getting My Stuff Into Evernote
Evernote offers a number of options for getting your data into the application. It’s great that Evernote users have such a variety of options for getting their data into the application but I do recommend spending sometime to organize and maintain your data after its capture. Some of the methods I outline here require you to follow up with tagging and putting the data into an appropriate Evernote notebook. Some other apps may require some light cleanup after you capture data into Evernote through them because they may add extraneous tags. There have been a couple of times my Evernote account has bordered on a document dumping ground that would defeat the purpose of the app.
Here are my preferred methods for getting data into my Evernote account:
Typing. Evernote is a note taking application after all and the text editing tools have only become more robust on the iOS, Mac, and Windows clients. I capture a good bit of my notes into Evernote the old-fashioned way.
Drag and drop. One of my favorite uses of Evernote is to capture research and as project archives. I just drag and drop files whether it is a PDF of a research report or a screen capture directly into an Evernote notebook.
Web clipping. I recently gave up on Firefox as my first line web browser and standardized on Google Chrome. My line of work means I try to be browser agnostic but Chrome finally toppled Firefox as my day to day browser meaning I get to use the Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome and Clearly. The Web Clipper enables you to clip just the story or the entire page. The only advice I can give here is because the clipper sends the web page into your default Evernote notebook
Email. Every free and Premium Evernote accounts comes with its own email address making it to forward emails and documents directly into your Evernote account. I do recommend that you add your Evernote email address (found under account settings).
Take a picture. I’ve only just embraced using the camera on my iPhone 4 for note taking but see the definite potential especially when I return to a more technical writing role. It works great taking a picture of a white board. Evernote Premium enables you to search through images for text.
FastEver XL. I previously posted about FastEver XL. While there is a lot to love about Evernote, firing up the mobile apps (at least on iOS) can be a little slower than it should be. When I was having medication issues after my Total Thyroidectomy, I looked to Evernote as a tracking tool but didn’t want to have to keep specifying an Evernote notebook and tags for certain notes. I found FastEver XL speedier than the iOS Evernote client and it keeps notebook and tag specifications making note entry simple and quick.
Fujitsu ScanSnap Scanner. Scanning documents into PDFs using traditional scanners can be a slow and cumbersome process in my experience. I then read a LifeHacker post about the Fujitsu ScanSnap Scanner and picked one up to scan in invoices and other documents. My new Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100 enables me to scan into PDF and then send the PDFs directly into my Evernote account as an option in the ScanSnap Manager. My only advice about this approach is to not forget naming the files as part of your workflow lest you have a bunch of notes with titles like 2011_12_14_21_07_18.pdf
Import in from OneNote. While the new OneNote 2010/OneNote 2010 WebApp are pretty compelling in their own right. You have the option to import notes into Evernote directly from OneNote. Go to Evernote (Windows version only), go to the File menu and choose Import. From the Import menu, choose Microsoft One Note and then follow the prompts to import your OneNote data into your Evernote account.
Seesmic for iPhone. It seems more of my professional reading starts inside my Twitter feed so I use Seesmic on my iPhone because it enables me to capture tweets directly into my Evernote account. It’s convenient and a great memory tool for capturing news items I want to follow up on when I am back home.
Setting Up Stacks And Notebooks
I was an early adopter of Evernote so I can best describe my stack and notebook organization schema as fluid because I got to take advantage of new features as they went live across the Evernote clients so I’ve made a lot of tweaks and adjustments along the way. Originally, I started off with just a few simple Evernote notebooks because at first I was only using Evernote for project notes.
My current organizational schema inside Evernote breaks down as follows:
- One stack per segment of my life
- One notebook per major project or event.
- One willkelly notebook that functions as my default notebook and inbox of sorts
Tagging Notes
My approach to tagging notes in Evernote is evolving just like my notebook and folder management. Because I use apps like Seesmic for iPhone to capture data into Evernote I find my tagging sometimes getting a bit unruly. Here is breakdown of the tagging model I try to follow:
- Broad category (like Thyroid)
- Descriptive tag (like medical billing)
- Descriptive tag (like health insurance)
- Important name (like the name of an Endocrinologist)
Setting up Evernote clients
One of the real benefits of Evernote for me is being able to access my notes across my devices. I stay pretty aggressive on updates on my iOS devices, PCs, and Macs so I’ve selected Automatically check for updates Daily and Update to beta versions when available to ensure I am running the latest clients. True, I’ve been bitten once or twice because of this aggressive upgrade strategy but I take that as part of life as an early adopter.
In 2012, I plan to write some more detailed posts about how I use Evernote so stay tuned.
How did you get started using Evernote?
