The Great Evernote Experiment
I used Evernote about ten years ago. I thought it was a good idea, but never quite got it into my work process. It was free then. It’s free now. And it’s much, much better.
What is Evernote? It’s a way to organize all the random crap that you come across—web sites, documents, notes. You can scan into Evernote. You can put handwritten text into Evernote. Whatever you want you can catalog it and index it.
The Evernote of yesterday was a PC program. Today it runs on PCs, on Macs, on the Web, on Android and iPhones tablets, and so on. Everything is synchronized to everything else, so if you put something in one place then you have it everywhere. Cool!
And it’s fast. The PC version does incremental search as fast as you can type what you’re looking for, it’s right there in front of you. You can tag things and look up by tag. And you can create notebooks with different kinds of content. It’s even supposed to create search entries for text images—a kind of poor-man’s OCR.
Even better: you can add checkboxes to items and create “to-do lists in context.” So instead of keeping a to-do list, choosing something from the list and then having to pull out or browse to the relevant information, you can put the todo button right in the Note and produce a list of notes with to-do's attached.
There’s a Chrome add-in that makes it easy to clip content from Web pages. You can highlight part of a page and Evernote will clip it, create a note, and log the URL, the date and time, and some other information in the note. This simplifies the job of clipping web references for (for example) RSILT and other blogginess.
You can share notes with individuals or make them public; you can organize notes into notebooks, and share them or make them public. You can create a hierarchy of notebooks. On and on.
I found a guy who uses Evernote to-do lists to create a blogging process. He creates a note, adds a bunch of checkboxes representing the stages in his process, checks them off as he goes.
What am I doing with Evernote? Starting out. I’ve downloaded it to my PC. Practiced doing some clipping. If you don’t highlight a section Evernote does a pretty good (not perfect) job of finding the content, throwing away all the crap and just clipping that.
Oh, and Evernote has an API and there’s a Ruby Gem for Evernote, so I can extend it as I see fit.
I’m going to start putting my todo list in Evernote, as some power users have suggested, starting today. We’ll see how it goes.
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