How My Life Became Evernote Central

I have been a fairly long term user of Evernote but that my usage was just scratching the surface of what the service had to offer became abundantly clear when I started connecting with Daniel Gold, a US based attorney, blogger and Evernote fanatic. To get an idea of how Daniel uses Evernote is shown on one of the company’s featured blogs or you can go to his own web site and discover more there.

Evernote Guide

My shallow use of Evernote became pretty obvious when Daniel published his first e-book “Evernote®: The unofficial guide to capturing everything and getting things done” which is now in its second edition. Here Daniel explains how he uses Evernote to organise his life around Evernote and David Allen’s Getting Things Done philosophy. I’ll be honest and say that I find GTD too complex for my simple lifestyle and find Any.Do task manager for Android perfectly good enough for my needs.

The key to utilising Evernote is setting up a systems of tools for data collection and collation. Evernote has gone way beyond its humble beginnings as a webclipper and it is one of the few services I have been impressed enough by to buy a premium subscription and would happily endorse through an  affiliate program.  The only other cloud based package that I pay a premium subscription to and endorse through an affiliate program is SugarSync so I am not exactly flowing free with recommendations!

So how do I use it?

Evernote Webclipping

Like the majority of people my first introduction to Evernote was through its webclipping service.  Here web pages that I was viewing could be saved as a URL or in their entirety and synced between the Evernote desktop and web-based interfaces.  Webclipping became seriously easy with the introduction of the browser based clipping extension button for Chrome and Firefox. On a web page, click the button  and it is saved – it is that simple.

Evernote allows you to create separate notebooks to save your clippings and also permits tagging for easy search. My notebooks include one for tech stuff, another for the car, a personal notebook, one for food and drink and one to track online purchases and so on.

Webclipping with Evernote became ever better with the introduction of its Clearly extension. This simply removes all the extraneous junk like advertising in side panels etc and clips the heart of the page which you want to keep. This, too, is available both Chrome and Firefox.

Evernote On Android

I have long said that the future of the cloud is mobile and Evernote has put a lot of effort into making that happen. The Evernote app on my Android smartphone enables me to write notes, take photographs and make voice recordings which are then synced to my Evernote account and made available for both desktop and web based clients.

Just this week Evernote announced extensions for the Android Dolphon web browser so even on my phone I can save pages I have been viewing while on the move.  There is also a Skitch extension for Dolphin so I can annotate pages as well.

If I want to record documents I use my DroidScan Pro app which takes a photograph of whatever I want to visually record, converts it to as PDF file and then uploads it to Evernote.  Receipts, magazine articles, etc can all be saved in this manner.

Most social media based apps on the smartphone allow me to save information to Evernote through the share facility. So, if I see something on Facebook, Taptu newsreader or a page I see when mobile browsing using Dolphin, by hitting the share button I can then chose Evernote as the destination for whatever data I want to refer to later.

Evernote Desktop Scanning

I started to rationalise my paper filing system recently and opted to store stuff on Evernote. Most printers these days double up – triple up? – as copiers and scanners and with a few tweaks I managed to get all scans to automatically upload to Evernote.

First I had to create an Evernote Scans folder under My Documents and went into my printer’s scanner configuration section to choose this as the default destination for all scans. I then went into the settings on my Evernote desktop program and chose that folder to auto-sync with Evernote.

I also opted to auto-sync that folder with SugarSync so if for whatever reason one service was down the odds are I can access my data through the other, either through the desktop, web-based or Android apps. Paranoid! Moi!!

Evernote-The Write Stuff

I attend a lot of meetings – too many! – and conferences from which I am expected to distribute the information gleaned. To have to type up notes from a conference is, quite frankly, a PITA and a time consuming one at that. I have solved this by investing in a Livescribe digital pen.

After taking pages of notes on a special notebook I just plug the pen into the PC, kick start the associated desktop program and it uploads the notes in PDF format to Evernote.

I can then  distribute the PDFs to anyone who wants those details and don’t have to spend hours typing them up. There is the obvious proviso that you need readable handwriting!

You can read more here.

Evernote Extras

Like any good sync or storage service Evernote allows you to email “stuff” to your account. If you want this facility Evernote provides you with a bespoke email address and whatever you send to this is stored in your Evernote account.

There is also a really neat macro service called ITTT – If This Then That – which has hundreds of ways you can send data to Evernote in ready to use “recipes” or you can create your own. I am currently using it by coping starred items from Google Reader to an Evernote notebooks and emails in Gmail that are labelled Evernote are similarly dispatched to a Gmail notebook.

And if you look at the bottom of this post there is even an Evernote clip this facility so you can, if you want, save this or any other article on Web2 and More to your Evernote account.

So, how do you use Evernote?

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