This is the last of five blog posts on my favorite technologies.
Evernote, quite simply, is a place to put electronic files when you can’t think of anywhere to put them. For example, in the days before Evernote, I would keep a file of blog post ideas in a Word document. This was a single Word doc with many bullet points. As I used the blog idea, I would “scratch out” or delete the idea. But this meant I had to do a lot of scrolling through the doc, and I was always worried about overwriting the file or somehow or other “losing” it. All the information was on one document and I wasn’t comfortable with that.
Evernote is a database software of sorts. It allows you to capture text, electronic files, and even audio files, all piled into one program. You can add tags for easy sorting, and it indexes everything you save for easy querying. Now for blog post ideas, I have a tag for that and I enter each idea as a new “note” in Evernote.
There are plenty of other features of Evernote that I don’t use (e.g., apparently lots of people use it for creating task lists). I use it primarily to store random things that I want to easily access but don’t have an obvious place to put them. Some of my Evernote items include my frequent traveler numbers (e.g., hotel, airline), packing lists, books I want to read, and miscellaneous “good ideas.”
If you’ve ever thought to yourself “I need to keep this on file, but I have no idea where to put it,” then Evernote is for you. And best of all, you can sync it to multiple computers and your mobile tools (e.g., iPhone, iPad) so that you’ve got your Evernote everywhere. Very handy!
Got a favorite technology? Feel free to add your own in the comments section.