My friend and technology guru, Steve Anderson, was an early adopter of Evernote. After a meeting in which he praised its uses I signed up. I tried it out from time-to-time. And, alas I abandoned it. Every time we would be at a meeting, I would say, “I just don’t get why I would use Evernote.” He would patiently explain why he found it such a big part of his daily routine and how it met so many of his needs. This has been going on for at least two years.
Now I wasn’t concerned about my information being in the cloud. I am a huge believer in the cloud. I work with agencies that use online agency management systems. I am a big user of Dropbox. Every document, picture and tune I have is in my Dropbox file. But a couple of weeks ago I found how Evernote could benefit me. What has changed?
It was a particularly frustrating day of trying to determine which task reminders in my Outlook belonged to which clients. Over the past several years I have lost count of the number of project management tools I have tried. All that I have tried are just more complicated than I need.
I was reading my regular blog posts and someone mentioned Evernote. The light bulb in my head began to flicker. So I went to Google and did this search – ” Evernote for project management”. It wasn’t the first entry on the page but it caught my eye. The title “One Foot In Reality-Evernote as a Task Manager.” I cannot than Harold Shaw enough for this post. While I have modified how I enter and manage my notes a bit, the principal is the same. Having the follow up date at the beginning of the subject line allows me to quickly look at each client each morning and know exactly what needs to be followed up on or completed on that date.
While I was working on an update of my website just before writing this post, it occurred to me that Evernote would be a great place to have a folder which contains WordPress plugin information. I wanted to add a specific plugin to my site and I couldn’t remember the name of it. I had to go to a client where I knew I had used it, open their site and get the name. How much smarter would it have been to have captured the information when I found the plugin in Evernote, tagged it and been able to quickly retrieve it when I needed it.
Sometimes we are so deep into what we are doing our brains can’t think creatively.
How do you use Evernote and other similar tools to assist you in your daily work?
