1) Blog drafts
Ever have a great idea for a blog post? You don’t want to lose that idea. In Evernote you can quickly jot down those ideas. I have 778 unpublished blog drafts. Anything that will be an idea for a post. A photo. A website link. I’ll copy and paste instant messenger conversations into a note.
Hashtag bonus: If you have multiple blogs, you can tag each note with the blog name. This will help you to easily sort out the blog posts for each blog.
2) Archive interesting articles
When you read an article you want to save, you can use use the Evernote web clipper to save it. Just click the Evernote icon in Chrome–boom–saved into your “archive” notebook. There has been too many times where later on I wanted to share an interesting article I read, but I couldn’t find it. Now with Evernote, I can just search my “archived articles” notebook.
Hashtag bonus: If the article was originally tweeted by someone I know, I’ll tag the article with the person’s name.
3) Read later articles
Sometimes you’ll come across an article on your mobile device that you want to read later on your desktop. You can email the link to the article to an “action” notebook. When I’m reading through my RSS reader on the train, and there is an article I wish to read more, I send it to my “action” evernote notebook. There is one email address that I use that sends notes to that “action” notebook.
Hashtag bonus: I also add a hashtag to the subject line of the email, so then in evernote, it’s tagged with an action. Like #tocomment or #toread or #topost or #towatch
4) Archive your blog posts
If you have a blog, why not use Evernote as a complementary backup service? I also have a notebook hooked up to IFTTT, it automatically archives all my new spudart.org posts via RSS.
5) Fav articles
Hook up IFTTT to your RSS reader, so whenever you star an item in your RSS reader, it puts that article into your Evernote.
6) Archive screenshots
If you take lots of screenshots, then Evernote is a great place to store them. Evernote will go into each screenshot and index the text inside the images. Yes! Evernote makes the content of images searchable. About once a month, I take all my screenshots from my dropbox folder and drag them over to my “screenshots” notebook in Evernote.
Would you like a further explanation on any of these six uses? Let me know, and I’ll be glad to put together a longer explanatory blog post with screenshots.
Thanks to Abhay for originally inspiring this blog post. I copied our IM conversation into my “blog drafts” notebook in Evernote. Then today my brother Erik was asking if I use Evernote. Which was rather funny, because I was able to copy the text from Evernote and email it to him.
Thanks to my brother for asking about Evernote, it got me to go back and clean up the blog draft and post it here.
Also, Erik was asking if Evernote and Google Drive are competitors. In many ways, yes. I often have to ask myself which service to use to archive something. If something falls into the above six uses, then I use Evernote. Otherwise, I might use Google Drive.
One way that Google Drive is WAY better than Evernote is in collaboration. In Google Drive, you can have multiple people edit one note at the same time. If two people edit the same note simultaneously in Evernote, two copies of the notes are created, one will say “Conflicting Changes.” And Evernote doesn’t have comments for each individual note. Instead, Evernote has a general chat feature. One of our former managers shared a couple of his Evernote notebooks with me that had an archive of articles. So often I wanted to comment on particular articles in Evernote. But I couldn’t. So I would just email him my comments.
I’m a tag!
That’s right! Often times I wonder where I discovered a certain article, or why I read a particular article. It’s nice to know the original source of how I discovered it. So in the future if I recommend the same article to someone, I can say that I got that from James!
Cool tips, Matt. Thanks for sharing! Question: Isn’t — or wasn’t — there a way to have Evernote notes published on a blog?
Hmmm, posting Evernote notes on a blog would be an interesting feature. I’ll have to check and see if it’s possible.
I use Evernote to blend digital and analog workflows. I especially like using my Livescribe smartpen with Evernote. I’ll take notes using Livescribe’s Sky Wifi digital pen and Livescribe’s special paper, then wirelessly sync that content to Evernote. I’ve also used Evernote-branded Moleskine notebooks in which you use your cameraphone to photograph the pagers and upload them to Evernote. In both of these cases, Evernote will allow you to search your handwritten text. It’s also possible to do this by photographing any written or typed document from within the Evernote app.
I don’t use all of the Evernote’s capabilities, but I always find it incredibly useful. Like Matt, I take advantage of Web Clipper constantly.
I would need my handwriting to be more legible in my notebook for it to be useful in Evernote. However, it is very comforting to know that paper notes are backed up. Years ago when I kept everything in one single notepad, I accidentally left it on a shelf in the store with the notepad opened to one of thep ages. Nobody returned it. It must have been recycled. The cover of my notepad has my contact information, “if lost contact…” but since the notepad was flipped open to a particular page, the person who found it might have never seen the cover.
From that point on, all the paper in my notepad is pre-printed with my name and phone number. Plus, it’s just nice to have that, archivally speaking, because generations from now if any of the sheets of paper get separated from my book, people will know it came from my notebook. In that same spirit, every page in my paper notebook has the year.