The Evernote App: Clever Ways To Organize Evernote And Your Life

Evernote has been one of my most-used and loved apps since 2008—I recommend the Evernote app to everyone I meet because you get to keep your life in your pocket. Your work life too, if you’re a marketer and writer, as I am.

(By the way, if you’re a light user, or just want to try Evernote, it’s free.)

Before I burble on about the magic of Evernote, you may be wondering just what Evernote is?

Basically, Evernote is a way of organizing and managing the information in your life, including:

• Notes, reminders and tasks;
• Paper stuff. If you’ve ever lost a paper bill (or an electronic one) Evernote will forever save you from that aggravation. You can search the document images you add—text in images is searchable in the Evernote app;
• Photos… and much, much more.

The Evernote app: your life in your pocket

Even though I’ve been using the Evernote app for over a decade, I’m still finding wonderful new ways to use it in my life. I’ve used it manage and track my writing for years. I also snap images of any bullet journal pages I want to find quickly into an Evernote “journal” notebook.

Recently I started to use Evernote to organize and plan my home sewing. I started by creating several notebooks, rather than just one, then I created a notebook stack. So, that’s the first way to organize Evernote and your life: use stacks.

1. Use “stacks” to prevent notebook mayhem

To help me keep track of my sewing, I created a “sewing” notebook, then I created related notebooks:

• Sewing patterns;
• Sewing shopping: shopping lists, wish lists, retailer lists, book lists…;
• Sewing YouTube channels and podcasts;
• Sewing tutorials…

Next, before I went any further, I created a notebook stack, to keep all my sewing notebooks together.

To create a Sewing notebooks stack, I just dragged the Sewing Patterns notebook onto the Sewing notebook, then I dragged the other notebooks into my new sewing stack.

Brilliant. Now, when I go shopping, I can check the photos in my Sewing Patterns notebook to ensure that I don’t buy patterns I already own.

And if I want to buy fabric for a pattern, I have the front and back photos of all my paper patterns in Evernote: I can buy precisely the yards of fabric and notions I need. No more getting home and realizing that I need to make another journey to find a color of sewing cotton I don’t own.

2. Track your home life: insurance policies, guarantees, recipes…

You don’t need to create stacks if you have fewer than 20 notebooks. When you do start creating them, consider creating a “home” stack. This keeps your home info separate from work stuff.

Keep routine paperwork like insurance policies and guarantees in Evernote. Many companies offer these in PDF form, so you can just drag them into a notebook.

Got paper? Use Evernote to snap photos of your paper documents directly into a notebook. Receipts can go into a Finances or Money notebook, for example.

3. Track your business life: expenses, trips, meetings…

Receipts form part of your business life too. Use Evernote to take photos of all your receipts, so that you’ve always got a record when you complete your expense reports.

Do you travel for work? Evernote is ideal to manage all the bits of information you need to track: tickets, packing lists, schedules, itineraries, addresses, maps…

I love using Evernote to manage meetings and projects at work. One of the app’s major benefits is that you can share notebooks with others.

So, when I take over a client project account, I create a notebook for the project, and share it with my colleagues, as well as with my contacts within the client company. Everything that’s important goes into the notebook: the client’s brief, meeting notes, advertising drafts, photos and images, as well as reports. After the project winds up, it’s easy to archive the project.

The Evernote app: everything you need, and it’s all searchable

Do you do most of your reading in the Kindle app on one of your devices? I do. It spoils you, because bookmarking, making notes, and searching your ebooks and other documents is so easy.

(If I read paper books, I’ve found myself hunting for the Search button a couple of times.)

When you dump everything you need to reference and remember into the Evernote app, your life becomes easier. No more oh no! panics because you forgot to pack a presentation, letters of agreement or invoices.

It’s all in Evernote.

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