Evernote
Have you discovered Evernote yet? I’ve become very impressed with this simple catch-all for ideas, notes, events, even your favorite wine. Essentially, it can capture just about any content, including web pages, PDF files, documents, text clippings, photos, and email messages. The real power of Evernote is, at least for me, twofold:
- It’s cross platform, working seamlessly on my iPhone. Any information I capture appears both on my laptop and my iPhone and is fully searchable in either place.
- Evernote’s search and retrieval capabilities are phenomenal. In part, this is because it uploads everything to a central server where character recognition is run on everything non-text, turning images, scans, faxes and PDF files into fully, content-searchable documents.
As my library of Evernote content has grown it has become more and more indispensable. This took a while. At first I had my typical quandary when facing a new tool. “Where do I put this? How will I find it again?” Eventually I discovered the answer to both questions is actually quite simple: Put everything in Evernote, and don’t worry about finding it again — it’s just going to work. And it does.
This doesn’t mean it’s entirely effortless, but it’s close. I still love Apple Mail and it’s powerful search capabilities, and I still have gigabytes of documents tucked away in my file system. I don’t dump all of my mail into Evernote. Evernote gets most of my documents, faxes, PDFs, images I snap on my iPhone. But it also gets email that I think falls into the “ooh, I’m going to want to reference that again later” category, and it works nicely — especially when there’s a document or image attachment.
Give it a try, but do be religious about it for a while. Until you have enough information in Evernote, you’ll feel like you’re doing double-duty. Eventually, a transition happens and you find it has become central to your workflow. Now, I use it every day — categorizing materials I want to research, as an “idea board” for rough drafts and notes that I’m working on, and as a way to tuck away anything I’ll want to find again.
