How To Use Evernote To Become More Productive

It came to my attention last week via a discussion on LinkedIn that many people still are unclear about how to use +Evernote  to become more efficient and/or productive in their jobs, so this post will touch on the ways  Evernote can help you become productive in your day-to-day activities.

The biggest thing is that as a note taking  tool, Evernote can easily capture all kinds of media (text, voice, image) in the same note without giving you some crazy HTML code as part of the note when you come back to make some additional changes. Evernote is also helpful as a blogger if you have some quick thoughts to jot down or  even enough time to type out a full post but only have access to your phone (which is what I’m starting this post on as I’m waiting for my flight to take off). I use Evernote instead of the Blogger app when I’m on the go in this instance, because of the HTML issue I just noted.

iPhone Version

Desktop Version

Several features make Evernote a useful tool:

• Notebooks – Evernote allows you the ability to group different sets of notes as Notebooks. For example, you could have a notebook for each project you work on or each client that you work with during the year.
• Notebook Sharing – Each notebook that you can create can be shared with others for collaboration on Evernote, giving access to modify notes using phones, iPads, or computers as different ideas come to mind.
• Tags – You can tag each notes to index for searching. This could be useful in researching how you handled a particular issue from a different client/project and the documented outcomes
• Search – All of your notes are indexed for search by the tags you apply to each note and the content of the note itself, which makes for much more effective searching than Outlook for example. To put it simply, you can find the notes you’re looking for much faster.
• Location – While Evernote has the ability to geotag notes with your location, the benefit of this is somewhat limited since location is not part of the search parameters within Evernote. By that I mean if you click the places tab as show in the first diagram above, you can click into a location to see all notes associated with it, but if you type in a location in the search under All Notes it returns no results. This is fine if you only have a couple of places where you take notes, but I travel all of the time and this missing functionality seems like an oversight that should be easy to fix.
• Email TO Evernote – This isn’t a feature that I would use but it’s worth mentioning that you can Evernote provides you an email address so that you can email notes to Evernote for safekeeping. The one instance I can see this maybe being useful is if you have an email sent to you from a friend or colleague that you want to add to an Evernote notebook, you can just forward the email instead of copying and pasting it. For the most part, if you have internet access you can use Evernote so I’m not sure how much value this email option has for most people. 

I’ve heard that Noteability is a tool that has some drawing capabilities so if that’s something you need, that’s an app that may be worth looking at, but it will cost $1.99.

Microsoft OneNote appears to be almost exactly the same as Evernote, but it has increased security, so if the data you want to store is more sensitive in nature (client information), the Microsoft offering may be a better fit for you. It also comes with a much healthier price tag of $79.99.

When I started using Evernote, I was surprised at how much downtime/transit time I was wasting. If anyone has any other useful tips, I’d love to hear them in the comments. Also, if you’ve used Evernote Pro it’d be great to get some additional insight there as well.