It’s been a little over a year since I invited Evernote into my life full-time, and I don’t imagine I’ll be changing my mind on continuing its use any time soon. While we’ve had our lovers’ tiffs and occasionally pushed each other’s buttons, Evernote’s willingness to make sharing and storing information simple still leaves me breathless.
Ok… enough fun… Really, it’s just a cool tool, IF you know how to use it. I used to be one of the people who “had” an Evernote account and barely ever touched it. Technically I started my account in 2008, but it became a drop zone for recipes and not much else until last year. Then, through the good offices of Joshua Zerkel, an organizing colleague, friend, and Evernote Ambassador, my eyes were opened to what this tool could actually do for me, my family, and my business.
While I’m not going to ask you to sit through an hour long session about the wonders of Evernote (…yet!), I did want to pass along the Good News about ways you can use this tool effectively to keep your digital head on straight.
Favorite Use Cases
Client Notebooks – At Living Peace, for the past year the team has used Evernote as our digital client files, which then are shared directly with the client. All their information is together in one place. Contracts, receipts, and any resources or research we collect for the client is dropped directly into Evernote rather than via long strings of confusing emails. Links to charities, screenshots of possible shelving options, and links to the filing supplies they’ll need to buy before our next session, all of these items can go directly into the notebook with ease and be accessible from any device with an internet connection.
Blogging Editorial Calendar – I am using Evernote right now to write my draft of this blog post.
All my blog drafts get written here, and then my wonderful VA edits, polishes, and chooses images for them and formats them correctly in WordPress for us. As well as, incorporating them into messages for our community each Tuesday.
What’s even better is that at the beginning of the year we create one “pillar note” which becomes our Editorial Calendar for the year. It lists all the upcoming blog topics INCLUDING links to a blank note just waiting for the draft to be written.
Thus, all the content for our blog is created, organized, and easily retrieved right in Evernote land. Then we use Asana to manage the workflow/tasks for publishing the blog. (For more about that, you can watch my free training video on The Organized Blogger: Using Evernote & Asana as Your Editorial Calendar.)
Writing Email Copy – Got a program launch coming up? Working on a conversion funnel with an email drip sequence? Just like with the blogging calendar above, you can use a pillar note to craft the timing, topics, and sequence of the messages you’re going to send, then create separate notes linked back for each email message. And similarly, after you write them, you might be able to have your VA move them from Evernote into your marketing automation software and get them all ready to send.
Membership Cards – Doesn’t it seem like everyone has a membership card/loyalty program? And they all want you to carry these cards around in your wallet. Many times I would choose an app like Card Star for this purpose, but we also have memberships to places like the Newport Mansions, Historic New England, Trustees of the Reservations, etc. These places don’t need a bar code to scan, they just want to see that you have a valid membership card.
So, we keep pictures of our cards in our “Household” notebook that’s shared between me and my husband, so we can pull up the picture of the card whenever we want to go for a fun adventure. Usually, the photo and our ID will get us into the location no problem.
Conferences & Speaking Events – Want to make sure you don’t miss any of the great ideas at that next conference? Then, use Evernote to take notes and even make recordings of the presentation. Hear something amazing that you want to capture verbatim later? Then, type in a quick note of the time and topic, and you’ll be able to easily go back to that point in your recording to review. You can also incorporate photos of the slides directly into your notes. If there’s a handout, then you can either take photos of it or bring it home to scan and drop it right into the same note with your other gems of information about that session. Try using tags for conferences when you’ll be listening to a lot of different speakers but might want to pull all those notes together easily.
Business Procedures – How you do things is part of the value of your business, and having just sold my first company I know for a fact that one of the items of value to the woman who bought it was the processes that we developed over years. However, business processes are also a constant work-in-progress which means there’s a lot of issues with version control. That’s another reason I love Evernote. You can give access to anyone who uses the process, and if a minor change needs to be made, then we don’t have to worry about which version of the word doc someone grabs from their email to refer to or change. Rather they can go directly to appropriate notebook and update the note which will automatically be synced with all the relevant people’s accounts when they next open the program.
Travel Plans – Doing research about your upcoming vacation? Create a notebook for Travel and a tag for the upcoming trip, then clip all those websites directly into Evernote and you’ll be able to talk with your partner easily about the options for hotels, routes, or activities that have caught your eye. You can also capture notes during the trip about places you visited that you would love to be able to find again or recommend to friends including pictures. (Another great app for this purpose is Rego.)
Medical Papers – This one depends on how comfortable you are keeping this information in the cloud because there are no promises about HIPAA compliance, but I have found it to be hugely valuable to be able to keep test results that might need to be referenced later or provided to other specialists. I recently used it to keep a log of care for my cat’s illness. I tracked his meds and how much he ate each day in a way that could be easily shared with others providing care, as well as his vet.
Event Plans – Planning a wedding, anniversary, or birthday party? Need a place to keep all the research or other information about vendors, schedules, receipts, etc. so they’re convenient and shareable with others? Evernote is great for something like this, and I wish I had been introduced to it prior to my wedding. It would have made my big binder of information unnecessary and provided the information to the appropriate people so much more conveniently.
What Evernote DOESN’T Do Well
Keep Sensitive Financial Data – I personally wouldn’t use it for passwords, account numbers, or social security cards. That’s over my comfort line and there are better encrypted apps for those purposes (eWallet and LastPass are two of my favorites.)
Project & Task Management – There are MUCH better programs out there for managing your projects and to-do lists. The little “check boxes” built into Evernote are not adequate in my opinion. So, I would take a look at Asana, Wunderlist, or Trello for alternatives.
Customer Relationship Management – Evernote is not a CRM. There are also MUCH better programs out there to track client contact information and relationships. We use InfusionSoft, but there are TONS of CRM options out there.
Next Steps
Hopefully, this may have re-inspired you about that Evernote account you’ve left languishing. The most important thing is to think about your major categories of information and setup a clear notebook and tagging system from the start. If you have questions about getting started or creating your notebook system, then feel free to ask them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to help!
