I admit it. I have a really hard time keeping track of the amount of information that I am bombarded with on a daily basis. It is a constant struggle for me to know what it is I need to get done from a personal perspective. At work, it is easier because you have email, constant conversations about products you are working on, expectations, etc. Those kind of things don’t exist for my personal life when it comes to things like home improvements, insurance rates, investments, childcare, etc. I have tried tons of things over the years but what I have been using lately is a moleskine notebook that I carry around to jot notes in and ideas. But with everything I am figuring out its pitfalls. Enter Evernote.
Evernote is a well written piece of simple software that lets you take notes from you desktop, web, or mobile phone, interconnecting all of the worlds you live in. This is going to be the first post of a multipart series about the software and how I am using it to make my life simpler.
One of the biggest shortfalls of my moleskine system is finding things easily. I have a hard time when I am reading ANY physical media not subconsciously pressing the control-f or command-f to open a search window to find what I want. With Evernote, this task is now made trivial. If I am ever around where I don’t have my blackberry handy or laptop, I enter notes into my notebook. Once I am back to my desktop, I take a quick picture snapshot note of the page of notes that I was looking at. I do the same thing with post it notes that are laying around my office. Take snapshots of them, and now I have a nice collection of the information flow that I thought was important enough to write down.
With the image recognition software built into evernote, it indexes my handwritten pages into notes that I can search through. Very simple, and very, very elegant. Below I was searching for the words “out” and “note”, obviously:
Stay tuned as the next post I am going to show how it can help you make smarter wine purchases…
