Evernote: A place for your stuff
Evernote is one of a very short list of apps I use everyday. It is part of my strategy for maintaining in-box zero and its ubiquity means that I am never far from adding to or reading my notes.
Getting Started
Evernote is cloud-based storage for the bits and pieces of digital detritus we all accumulate. Need to remember a Web site you found, a phone number or a menu at the local take-out that you snapped a picture of with your cellphone? Evernote can do that. Best yet, the text in that picture of the menu becomes searchable after the Evernote servers work their magic on it.
Once you have signed up, you download the application to your computer. Evernote works on Windows and Mac. For mobile note taking there are apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Sony Ericsson X1 and Windows Mobile devices. Some of the magic of Evernote comes from installing the application on every device you use. I have it on the Macs at work and at home as well as on my iPhone. That means I am never far from my notes and I don’t need to have different systems for storing different kinds of information.
Our eMail system is capped at 250MB per account – not bad for the average user – but what about the very real need to archive messages for the long term? On the Mac, I can print a PDF directly into Evernote and delete the message knowing that I will have it forever.
Tags
If you have read even the first few pages of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, you know one of the techniques for regaining control of your world is reducing the number of in-boxes you have. Evernote allows you to avoid the hundreds of folders in your Documents folder that lay dormant years after their useful life has past. You can create notebooks in Evernote to keep your notes organized the way that makes sense to you. The power really comes, however, from tagging your notes as you make them. I tend to use notebooks to differentiate work and personal notes and then let my tags – keywords that will help me find the note later – do my organization.
Two things that I discovered while researching this article are the ability to group tags in a hierarchy and to sort tags by the number of notes. The first is great for organizing my projects and sub-projects. The second lets the topics that I have a lot of information on (and therefore are likely the topics I use the most) float to the top of the list.
Dollars & Cents
Signing up for Evernote is free. The free account allows you to upload up to 40MB per month and accepts images, audio, ink and PDFs. I started out as a free account holder and ran that way for about 3 months before upgrading to the Pro account. The Pro account is $5/month or $45/year and gives you 500MB of upload a month and accepts any file type up to 25MB per file. Transferring your notes is SSL encrypted for Pro account holders.
