Evernote Your Stuff by Lissanne Oliver

As a creative peep myself, I know it can be tricky to manage all the ideas, inspirations and references that are used to create. Collecting, storing and retrieving can be a challenge.

If you're anything like me you’ve used a random collection of sticky notes, scraps of paper, notebooks, browser bookmarks and bits and bobs torn from magazines and newspapers.

The old way of doing things:



Thanks to a tip from Joshua Zerkel of Custom Living Solutions I discovered a new way of doing things. It's called Evernote.

What makes evernote special? As they say, “Capture, organise, find.” Evernote is many things: a dumping ground, a search tool, an organising tool. It’s searchable, you can use tags, you can store snippets of text, URLs, photos, voice notes, sketches, literally anything you can think of. It will also recognize your handwriting so can search your (scanned or photographed) handwritten notes; amazing! I think it’s a great place for all those bits of info I *might* need or want to lay my hands on without thinking too hard about it.
It’s an app, a web based application, downloadable software from your computer. It automatically syncs across all mediums. Best of all, it’s free.


Here’s some ways I use evernote:

* I scribe creative ideas- say, an idea for a newsletter theme or blog post for time management and call the note “Next Newsletter”. I could also tag the note if I wanted say “time management" or "productivity" so I can easily retrieve multiple notes easily.

* I collect notes into notebooks - house renovations, Professional Organiser Training and recipes are just three of my notebooks, but you can have dozens of notebooks (or folders, if you like).

* I created a screen grab of my company web colours so I could be consistent with design across mediums. It’s safe in Evernote. And if it wasn’t in Evernote, where would I put it for goodness sakes?

* I dump images of decorating or design for inspiration.


Photo source: http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/942134/

* Notes scribbled from a phone call are photographed on my webcam and uploaded so I can chuck the scrappy note and have a clutter free space. love it!

* I take a photo on my iphone of supplier opening hours can simply name the ‘note’ with the name of the store.

* I archive PDFs of my existing newsletters so I can know when I last mentioned a particular concept or tip.

Blowing your mind yet? Evernote really is “remember everything”. I don;t want to mess with your head, but the above are just the starting point... in the future, everyone will use Evernote. I swear I'm getting and Evernote tattoo.

There are so many ways you can use Evernote. Do you use is? Have you used it for task or project management? I’d love to hear!