How I use Evernote

This is the first article in a series of articles I am planning to write on how I use my productivity tools. I hope this series will prove useful to you all.

My first 'tool' is Evernote. The ubiquitous note taking application for pretty much all platforms.

Evernote is quite possibly the best note taking app available for all mobile devices. It might not be the fastest loading, but what you can do with Evernote is almost limitless.

The only word of advice I would give on Evernote is to make sure that you tag everything you put in there. Over time you are going to build up a large amount of data and you will want to have a way of finding that data quickly and efficiently. By tagging everything this searching becomes extremely easy.

I strongly suggest that when you set up your Evernote account (it’s free!), you save the unique email address Evernote gives you into your phone’s contact list. That way you can easily forward any webpages or emails you receive directly to your Evernote account.

This is what I use Evernote for:

• Collecting articles for future free talking classes
• keeping notes of all my one to one classes (tagged under each company or person in a notebook called "One to Ones"
• Collecting ideas for new clothes (here I post the images into a note under a tag for Spring / Summer or Autumn / Winter)
• Collecting research notes and articles for future books and blog posts
• Collecting articles of interest on any subject I find interesting. For example, I collect articles of interest on Ian Fleming the author and Cary Grant the actor.
• I scan in all important receipts as well as forwarding all receipts I get from purchases I make online
• Collecting pay slips and tax invoices
• Collecting ideas for my seminars - these can sometimes be notes I write myself or something I have found while reading articles online.
• Collecting tutorials for learning more about using my Apple products under a tag called "Mac Tutorials"
• A place to keep all my hand written notes. I just take a picture of the note after I have finished. I tag it and place it in the appropriate notebook.

That is just the way I use Evernote. However, Evernote can be used for so many different purposes. If you are interested in more, then here’s a link to another 100 ways to use Evernote.

As you can see, I use Evernote for both work and personal life. Because of the way Evernote is structured, it is actually quite easy for me to separate these two parts of my life, but at the same time if I were out with friends, and an idea about something related to work suddenly came to me, then I would be able to get the idea down and forget about it, knowing it was 'captured' and so not forgotten about.

There are many note taking applications out there, many are good, some are not so good, but for me, because of the way Evernote is organised and because it is available on all my mobile devices as well as my desktop, Evernote works perfectly.

Next time, I will show you how you can use Evernote to learn English.