Why Using Evernote Will Make You Smarter!
It’s one of my all time favorite productive tools that makes my life run better – Evernote!! I have to stop myself from putting too many exclamation points behind it because I love it sooooooo much! I recommend it to all my coaching clients and anyone I ever talk to that I see using pencil and paper to capture a note. It is one of the top 5 most powerful tools in my Remarkable Life Toolkit.
Top 5 Reasons I LOVE Evernote
1. It Saves My Brain Power for the Important Stuff – Our brains are already overworked, so why do we keep trying to jam more stuff in there hoping we can find it next time we need it? IT’S NOT WORKING! Stop trying to write more stuff into your hard drive. Use it for the most important things of your life – dreaming, strategic planning, creating, engaging others. Your brain has incredible power but it’s not without limits. So use it well by creating good places to store the stuff you might only need to recall every once in a while.
Action: Put meeting notes, ideas, phone numbers, articles, and anything else you might need to remember in Evernote.
2. It’s Always With Me – I never have to be without my place to keep things because the brilliant minds at Evernote have created seamless syncing between my iPhone, iMac, Macbook, iPad, and even the Evernote Web Portal. I can capture a note, a picture, an article from any of my devices and it automatically syncs to every device as soon as I open Evernote when I’m connected to the internet.
Action: Download the app on your devices right now. Then create your account and like Evernote magic, watch them all sync up!
3. It’s Hyper Organized So I Don’t Have To Be – I can tag any note with multiple identifiers. I label all my blog posts with a “blog” tag and a “post” tag. I labeled this Toolkit note with a “blog” tag and a “life tools” tag. I can then file specific notes in individual “notebooks”. So all my favorite recipes can go in its own “Recipes” notebook. All my articles on health and fitness can go in the “Articles” notebook, and on and on it goes. It has lots of organization built into it.
Action: Start by creating a few notebooks, i.e.. Work, Home, Recipes, Articles. Then create a few tags to help you label each note you create. (Evernote has a powerful search engine built in so you can easily find any note you create.)
4. Clips Web Articles and Websites for Later Viewing – I love this feature! The Evernote Web Clipper is a browser add-on that allows you to clip an article from the web that you either don’t have time to read or you love it and want to save it for later. You can clip any article or web site and save it as a bookmark, screenshot, simplified article, or the full page. You can also add tags and notebooks at the time of clipping. It also has an incredible set of markup tools that allowed me to do this kind of cool stuff for you! (here is an example!)
Once you clip it you are viewing and it syncs directly to your Evernote, no matter where you are looking at it from.
Action: Click here to download the Evernote Web Clipper and install it into your preferred browser.
Action: Download the app to your smartphone and start snapping pictures of all the notes you normally write down on paper. It will save you LOTS of time!
5. It’s Like my Eyeballs with a Memory! – I’m a visual learner. If I can see something it’s easier to lock it into my brain. With the Evernote mobile app, you can use your phone or tablet to capture an image of whatever you want to store – business card, telephone number on a sign, the license plate of the guy who just ran into you, or the multi-million dollar idea you just drew up on a napkin! Snap a pic and Evernote files the image away with whatever title you want, tag you prefer, in whatever notebook you need, it even includes your location where the image was captured (if your location services are turned on)! You can even use it as a page scanner to store quotes from books, images of documents, or maps.
Action: Download the app to your smartphone and start snapping pictures of all the notes you normally write down on paper. It will save you LOTS of time!
These are my top 5 reasons I love Evernote. Wait – did I mention it’s FREE!!!!! The basic version is FREE!!! Premium version is available for a small monthly fee but for many casual users the FREE version will be plenty.
So go get it now and make your life work better by treating your brain with kindness. Give the brain a break from all the mundane stuff so it can help create the life you truly enjoy! Click on the Evernote Elephant and get smarter!
My tip:
I have a Notebook called Lestie’s Weekly Notebook. It has 7 items (Notes). They are:
01 Monday
02 Tuesday
Etc.
The leading numbers are so they will sort (why aren’t our days are in alphabetical order?)
This becomes my To Do list for the week. I am constantly adding, changing, and deleting as I get things done.