How do you remember all of your stuff?

  photo by exfordy

I like to keep track of stuff – notes I take during a meeting, ideas that come up at odd times and get thrown onto a post-it note, a cool website I run across, powerful images I could use for blog posts, interesting videos or a important emails.  Historically I haven’t had much of a system for being able to track all of that stuff…but I think I may now have an answer that could really work!

I stumbled onto Evernote over a year ago and I was intrigued by the possibilities, but I wasn’t sure how practical or helpful it would be.  At the time I had an older Palm OS phone that didn’t let me do much of anything and I was primarily just using one computer in my office.  Fast forward to now – I’ve got an Android phone, I’m using a laptop and a desktop for different things and I need access to all of my stuff from all of those places.

Although I’ve only used the application sparingly so far, I’m seeing some strong possibilities for Evernote – here are a couple of ways I’m using it so far (and I’m just scratching the surface):

• I finished a great book and wanted to make sure I remembered the author the next time I was book shopping.  I took a picture of the book and stored it in Evernote where it was easy to bring it up 2 weeks later on my phone in the book store.  (Did the same thing with a great bottle of wine we had at a friend’s house).
• I’m starting to use it Evernote for note taking – creating a someday / maybe file of ideas that I’d like to do…someday maybe (that way I don’t lose the thought but I get it out of my head).
• When I buy things online I virtually clip the receipt and store it in Evernote in case I need the confirmation number.

Here are a couple of things that I haven’t used yet, but look pretty powerful:

• Evernote has character recognition built in, so you can scan or take a picture of your handwritten notes, store them in Evernote and later search on the text to find what you want…(could do that with business cards as well).
• You can encrypt files – so saving all of your application passwords and IDs in an encrypted file that you could get to from anywhere.
• You can create specific notebooks of information and share just that notebook.  Imagine if you were doing a project with 3 other people and you had notes, pictures, a video and some websites as input for the project.  Put it all into a single notebook and share it – it gets updated for all of you as new things are added.

I don’t know if Evernote is going to be as useful as Dropbox (which I use extensively) and it’s going to take some effort to incorporate Evernote more into my workflow – but the possibilities are pretty amazing!  Check out the Evernote Video page for lots of cool ways people are using it.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller

Life does move fast – I’d like a place to put some of the cooler things to look at later…Are you using Evernote?  What have you found to be really useful?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach