Work Smarter with Evernote. Alexandra Samuel
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Copyright 2013 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation
Evernote® is a registered trademark of Evernote Corporation.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4221-9511-6
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.
The web addresses as well as the Evernote interface as described in this book were correct at the time of the book’s publication but may be subject to change.
This ebook was produced with http://pressbooks.com.
Acknowledgments
This book reflects the guidance and dedication of a terrific team at Harvard Business Publishing. Ania Wieckowski worked with me to structure and revise (and revise, and revise) a manuscript that would be both readable and useful, and her ongoing enthusiasm and insight made the process a joy. Scott Berinato, who edits my HBR blog, not only has been my best writing teacher but also helped to shape and develop this book project.
My former colleagues at Emily Carr University were the people who ignited my interest in ebook writing, and I am particularly indebted to Jonathan Aitken, who worked with me in developing the initial vision for this manuscript. My colleagues at Vision Critical have been generous in sharing their own experiences with Evernote, and in making room for this project in the midst of our broader social media efforts.
The principles and practices in this book are drawn from a much larger community of collaborators and correspondents in the social media world, including not only those quoted here, but the many others who have geeked out with me online or even face-to-face. As ever, the geek-in-chief is Rob Cottingham, my partner in Social Signal and in life, who may be the only other person in the world who thinks that Evernote taxonomy structure is an awesome thing to discuss in bed.
Introduction
This short book explains how to make your work more focused and effective with one of the most valuable software tools available today: a web-based notebook—specifically, the popular Evernote application. It shows you the best features and tips for how to capture everything you need to work smarter, prioritize the work that matters most to you, and tap the social web as a powerful tool for collaboration and expression.
Evernote is part of a new generation of social web tools that combine some of the Internet’s newest and most powerful capabilities: accessing your information from any device, collaborating through social content sharing, and organizing your content quickly and easily through keyword-based tags. As a social tool like Twitter, LinkedIn, and others, Evernote makes you not only more effective on your own, but also a more valuable and competent team member.
A web-based notebook is at the heart of this new social toolbox. Think of a web-based notebook as a cross between a traditional paper notebook (easy to use, keeps everything in one place, captures images as easily as text) and a word processor document (legible, searchable, editable) with a swirl of the social web (collaborative, tagable, and accessible online).
If you have ever wasted a minute looking for the notes you jotted down last week, wracked your brain for the name of that supplier you met last month, or wondered what you really accomplished in the last year, a web-based notebook can be a transformative tool. Getting hung up on questions like “where did I put that?” and “what should I really do next?” doesn’t just waste time and energy; it can actually keep you from achieving your full potential. By capturing all your work in one place and organizing it to keep your top priorities front and center, a web-based notebook can help you take charge of all of those thoughts and ideas—and let you take control of your priorities and get ahead in your job—in a way that works for you.
Evernote
Whether you are a new or long-standing Evernote user, this book will teach you tips and show you ways to use Evernote that you’ve never thought of—from practical help on effective note taking to advice on organizing Evernote to support your top priorities. If you’ve already tried Evernote but abandoned it because it’s not clear how Evernote improves your day-to-day work flow, this book aims to give you the guidance and inspiration you need to use it effectively to more closely align your daily work and your big-picture goals.
That’s because the benefits of Evernote go way beyond simple productivity gains, though people do save time and work more effectively when they use a web-based notebook. Merely asking our tech tools for a few extra minutes doesn’t go far enough, not when our computers and software choices frame so much of our workday and so much of our lives. As the place where we do so much of our working and thinking, our tech tools need to help us identify, create, and sustain the kind of work we want to do, to put and keep us on the right career path. Used thoughtfully, Evernote can do just that, by providing a context for the daily reconnection to mission that is advocated by leadership experts like Peter Bregman and productivity gurus like Stephen Covey. A tool like Evernote can help you not so much keep up with your daily onslaught of tasks, but get ahead by helping you to focus on those tasks that are most important to your own personal and professional mission.
In this book, you’ll find ideas on how you can use Evernote to capture everything, organize your notes, and share your work and insights with your colleagues or the world. You’ll learn how to:
Set up a capture kit that lets you add to or retrieve from Evernote using your computer, web browser, mobile devices, and/or camera.
Structure your notes with the notebooks, notebook stacks, and tags that keep your top priorities front and center, working from a suggested organizational scheme.
Share your work more easily by using Evernote to support your blogging and tweeting, and by sharing notebooks from within Evernote itself.
Together, these form your capture habit—your routine for adding notes to and retrieving information from Evernote. The capture habit is what frees your mind from the burden of trying to remember all those stray bits of information. Organizing your notes around your top priorities keeps your work aligned with your professional and organizational goals. Using Evernote to share your work helps you tap the power of collaboration and build your own professional reputation. You can select the pieces of this framework that solve your key challenges, or, to truly transform your professional capacity, you can approach it as a whole: a coherent strategy that brings these three strands of Evernote use together.
This book focuses on Evernote because it’s the web-based notebook that works for the widest range of users (because it’s available for both Mac and Windows users, and on a variety of mobile platforms) and integrates with many other applications and devices. But many of the strategies and practices outlined here are equally relevant to other notebook tools, such as SimpleNote and OneNote, described in the table. More important than the software itself is the way you use that software to support your professional goals and personal work flow.
Some Evernote alternatives
| Application | Consider if… |
| SimpleNote | You like minimalist applications or do a lot of note taking by phone and want a faster app to use instead of (or to sync with) Evernote. |
| Springpad |
You want |