I have no doubt that if you read this blog, you are most likely the kind of professional who has at least heard of Evernote. This Cloud app is widely popular due to its ability to help you create a paperless office. You can scan receipts and documents directly to Evernote with scanners like Fujitsu’s ScanSnap. If you already have scanned documents as PDFs or jpegs, just attach them to a note. One of the things I love about Evernote is that it gives you unlimited storage space (although depending on your plan, you may have a limited amount of data you can upload in any one month). There’s a desktop version, so if you don’t have an internet connection, you can still work on any notes you’ve created. And naturally there’s an iPhone version as well. I could go on. But here are seven ways in which I use it specifically as a creative professional.
- Film and story ideas. Whenever I have an idea for a film, or an idea to implement in a film project I’m already working on, I create a note and put it in the appropriate Notebook (Notebooks are the places where you store Evernote notes).
- Research. I love using the web clipping feature for saving web pages that I want to go back and read. This is great if you’re doing research on a documentary project for instance. And if you clip the whole page (as opposed to just the link), you can still read it even if you’re not connected to the internet. Evernote has web clipping plugins for all the major browsers.
- Call logs with Clients. Any time I’m on the phone with a client or prospect for any length of time, I create an Evernote to take notes. It’s also a good practice to do this whenever you talk to places like your bank, credit card company, or any other business where you might want to go back and reference what they said.
- Checklists. I keep my equipment checklist in Evernote, as well as any other important checklists.
- Photos for Inspiration. You can save photos to a Notebook, and you have one place where you can easily access visual inspiration whenever you need it.
- Inspiring Quotes. I am moved by quotes that inspire me. Whenever I hear or read something that really clicks with me, I save it to my “Inspiration” notebook.
- Blog Ideas. In order to maintain the current blogging schedule I’ve been doing, I need to keep track of all my blog topic ideas, no matter how insignificant they may seem. I save them in my Blogging notebook and check off topics as I write them. Some topics never get written. But if I’m ever at a loss for ideas, I just come back to the list.
I use Evernote for location scouting. When I drive or walk by a location and something catches my eye, I take a photo, add it to my “Location Scouting” notebook, add the proper tags, and drop a pin to save the location.
Thanks an excellent use Jeff. Thanks for sharing.
Ron – I’ve been using Evernote quite a bit lately too. I use it for my daily to-do lists. Like you said in your last post about Google docs, I have a hard time staying on task. My lists help me do that.
I also use it to help me map out my ideas for products, blog posts, etc. Great, great tool, and I know I’m just scratching the surface with it. You might also check out Michael Hyatt’s blog who talks about Evernote quite a bit.
Funny you mentioned Michael Hyatt’s blog. I read it last week knowing mine was coming up. Lately it seems like my topics trail closely behind his. Alas, great minds do think alike. 😉
The best feature of Evernote i its ability to handle disparate media.
Unlike a notepad, or notepad app, the ability to clip whole web pages (because they change, or vanish) photos, text, etc is incredibly helpful. Because we don’t just think in words. We think in ideas.
So ture Anthony. You can even add media like mp3 and listen to them directly within Evernote. I haven’t tried adding a video file, but I assume that would work too.
Ron,
Thank you for your post. I had been trying out Evernote for a while now but with your blow post, it made me look into it and today I did and I’m feeling like I love it more than ever…hope this let’s me organize myself with all the random “errands” and “topics” that come-up in my head everyday and it makes me “multitask” which then nothing gets done.
Great article! 🙂
Roody
Hey Roody. So glad it helped. Sometimes I think I’m writing stuff everyone already knows. But I always get comments like yours that inspire me to keep going. Thanks again.
I’ve been using Evernote for awhile now. Some of the things I’ve done with it include:
1. Capturing articles I started reading in the Dr. waiting room so I can finish them.
2. Capturing ads in magazines, billboards, etc. for products I want to check out.
3. Capturing the contents of storage bins (which I’ve labeled numerically)
4. Using my phone to capture receipts immediately (so I don’t lose them before getting them home to be scanned).
This is in addition to the uses you’ve mentioned. I grab web pages quite a bit.
It actually isn’t true that you can add unlimited notes. Even though Evernote says so at https://www.evernote.com/about/premium/, Evernote support tells me that is a “typo”.
All accounts are restricted to an absolute maximum of 100,000 notes. Still a lot. But not by any means “unlimited.”
I requested they correct it, because it’s false advertising, but they still haven’t taken any action on it.
The app itself is also wrong, because it tells you approximately how many text notes are remaining this month, and for me it lists like 470,000. But with the absolute cap of 100,000 that’s just plain wrong.
doug
I’m about to try it out for taking notes in college (I love taking the notes down on my laptop and then studying them later on my phone), and taking notes at church. Have to see if it passes the test of saving notes when there’s no internet connectivity and syncing later. If it does that, score!
It absolutely can do that.
Somebody has tested clicktoapp in Evernote: http://clicktoapp.com