1. Evernote lets you take notes but in a sophisticated, modern way. You can write down your notes in several ways, share notes with others, and access Evernote across multiple devices. Ulysses creates documents out of fragments — a structure that lends itself to outlining in small segments.
2. Using Evernote - Quick Start Guide. The best way to start using Evernote effectively is to start creating notes. A note is just what it sounds like - any piece of information you want to save for later. Get started in 3 easy steps: Create a new note.
3. Edit: Evernote just released a 'Reminders' feature to deal with this use case. Evernote Reminders Are Here on Mac, iOS and Web For context: I use Evernote for the vast majority of my note-taking. 'TODO' items frequently come up while I'm taking.

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• Best Way To Use Evernote
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• How To Use Evernote

If you’re like most solopreneurs, you don’t have your best ideas when you’re at your computer. Creative ideas for your online business usually come when you least expect them… when you’re shopping, chatting with a friend over coffee, taking a shower, commuting to work, and so on.

6 ways to use Evernote to run a small business 1. Organize company info into separate notebooks. Spend some time thinking through the setup of your Evernote workspace. Scan and save bills, receipts, and business cards. Use the Evernote camera on your mobile device to scan bills.

And isn’t it infuriating when you later remember that you had a brilliant idea for blogging or marketing your website while running errands, but you just cannot remember the details?

Get into the habit of always recording an idea as soon as you possibly can. Grab it while it’s hot!

Not sure how to organize your business ideas effectively? There are many solutions available to record your ideas on the spot, wherever you are.

One of the most popular is Evernote. It’s an app that combines note taking, scheduling, bookmarking, and other features into a digital notebook you can access from anywhere.

Not only is Evernote available for all imaginable platforms, but notes that you create and collect automatically sync between your devices. Snap a picture on your phone and access it on your computer when you return to the office.

Evernote Pricing

Evernote offers three versions…

• BASIC (free)
• PLUS ($24.99/year)
• PREMIUM ($49.99/year)

The free version should be sufficient for most users. The paid versions allow for more upload space, offline access and several additional functions. You can start out with the free version and upgrade at any time.

To create your free account, sign up here at the Evernote Registration page.

Using Evernote’s Web Interface

While not the most convenient way to create and access your notes, the advantage of the web interface is that it’s available on any computer in any browser connected to the internet. To sign into your account, go here.

Evernote How To Guide

In addition to allowing you to create and manage your notes, the web interface also provides links to all other available applications.

Using Evernote’s Windows and Mac Applications

For larger and complex notes that you create while in front of your computer, use the Windows or Mac application. Get the Mac application by searching for Evernote in the App Store. The Windows application is available here.

The Mac and PC applications offer the richest functionality of all the Evernote apps, especially for searching, tagging, and organizing your notes, as well as creating large and complex notes.

This is where you will most likely reap the results of your information sleuthing.

Tag your notes, organize them into notebooks, and search their content. Evernote even indexes text in images, so if you snap a picture of a page of text, it becomes searchable.

To illustrate, I took a photo of my newspaper and searched for a word on the front page. Not only does Evernote find the photo note, it even highlights where on the page the word is used…

Using Evernote’s Browser Extensions

Download Evernote’s Web Clipper as an extension in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. The Web Clipper allows you to quickly create notes while browsing the Web.

Evernote for Smart Phones

An Evernote app is available for iOS and Android devices. Take notes on the go, snap a picture, record a voice memo. Allow your phone to auto-tag the note with your location. Then access it later from your computer.

Best Way To Use Evernote

Let’s say you’re writing a review of a new restaurant that you discovered…

Take a picture of your dish then snap a photo of the menu (the text of which will be digitized by Evernote). Add a few notes and allow your phone to tag the note.

When you return home to write the review, access all that information from the Evernote application.

Evernote Business Templates

Looking for small business organization ideas? Try Evernote’s business templates. There’s a prefab template for just about anything you need for your small business, including (but not limited to):

• Meeting notes
• Interviews
• Sales contracts
• Meeting agendas
• Project overviews
• Project budget planning
• Marketing Plans

Other Options for Adding Notes

Evernote offers more quick and easy options to add a note…

A friend sent you an email that sparked an idea? Forward it to your Evernote email address (you’ll find it in your account settings) with a couple of comments.

You can even send Evernote a Tweet or a text message (SMS) to create a brief note.

Evernote: An Easier Way to Keep Track of Ideas

Use Evernote as the single “bucket” to collect all your notes and ideas, wherever you have them.

How are you using Evernote? Please share your tips and tricks in the comments.

Evernote’s Notebooks

Source: MakeUseOf

You’ve been using Evernote for years , with your entire life stored on your account.

Everything used to work so well. But that meticulous notebook structure is now nothing more than a blight on your existence.

Trying to find a specific note? You may as well try to find a fart in a windstorm.

But remember, the problem doesn’t rest with Evernote here. Evernote is actually an incredible tool . You’re just organizing your notes in a way that can’t be scaled. There is a solution, though. And it’s a solution that can work for anyone, no matter how many notes you’re trying to keep on top of.

The Problem With Evernote’s Notebooks

Evernote has three layers to its organizational structure. It’s pretty simple, but you need to understand it to get the most out of the app.

First off are notebooks . These are like “folders”, where you save individual notes.

Next are stacks . These are like parent folders to help better organize your notebooks.

When most people start using Evernote, they fixate on these notebooks and stacks. It’s probably a hangover from organizing your files on Windows in the same way.

But Evernote’s notebooks and stacks have two main problems.

Notebooks can’t be nested. This means your organizational structure can only be one level deep.
In other words, you can have a child folder within a parent folder. But you can’t have a child folder within another child folder.

Second (and most frustrating) is that you can only place each note in one Notebook . If you have a note that’s relevant to two notebooks… tough. You can only choose one .

As your library of notes grows, these problems are almost guaranteed to turn your otherwise organized notes into a complete mess.

Luckily, Evernote has a third organizational tool: tags . You can assign descriptive, searchable tags to each note to help granularly organize your notes.
You can also nest these tags, and assigned several tags to each note. Problem solved.

Fixing Your Notebook Problem If you have a complex system of notebooks, your first challenge is to narrow these down to as few as possible.

Before I reorganized my own account, I had over 40 individual notebooks. Now I have five. You, however, might choose to have only two or three. These new notebooks are simply a way to organize everything extremely broadly. The real organization comes later.

Your Collection Box The most important of your few notebooks should be the initial notebook created for you when you set up your Evernote account. By default, this is named “[Username]’s Notebook”. Rename this to something like “-Inbox” or “-CollectionBox” to make it more descriptive.

Tip: Placing a symbol like “-” before the notebook name keeps the notebook at the top of your notebook list.

This notebook is where you’ll save pretty much all your new notes by default. When you create a new note through the mobile app, or grab a screenshot with Evernote’s Web Clipper , these should all be dumped into your “CollectionBox”. This saves you the hassle of tagging each and every note as soon as you create it.

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It’s far more productive to batch process that tagging every week (or month). Having all these new notes in a single notebook like this makes tagging quick and simple.

A Limited Number of Other Notebooks You should create any other notebooks sparingly. The more notebooks you create, the longer it will take you to decide where each note belongs. And the harder it’ll be for you to locate notes later on.

Since this new system relies so heavily on tags for organizing notes, notebooks are barely needed. If you take this to the extreme, you could create just one other notebook called “FilingCabinet”.

Tip: Avoid placing spaces in your notebook names and tags. This makes searching a lot easier.

After you tag each note in your “CollectionBox”, just move it over to your “Filing Cabinet”. This way, you’ll always know where you’re up to. And if you have a decent tagging system, it’s easy to keep a huge number of notes organized with just two notebooks. More on this later.

I chose to create a few other notebooks, however.

Ideas — Any notes detailing ideas I want to save, including article ideas, places I’m hoping to travel to, etc.

Personal — Where I store non-work related notes.

Reference — Where saved articles, book notes, screenshots, quotes, PDFs, receipts etc. are stored. Basically, any “knowledge” I might want to find in the future. This is by far my largest notebook.

Work — Where I store any work-related notes.

Your own notebook structure will be different to this, for sure. Just be mindful of creating notebooks sparingly. The more notebooks you have, the harder it is to keep everything organized.

Getting Serious With Tagging As I said, your notebooks should just be the broad foundation of your Evernote structure. The essence of your system should rely on tags .

The unscalable option here is to tag notes with a couple of rough topics, and hope you remember these tags in the future. Good luck with that!

The scalable option (a small sample of my own tags is below) is far more elegant.

Essentially, when tagging each note you want to know a few things about it:

What area it relates to, broadly speaking; preceded by “1”.

What type of content it is; preceded by “2”.

What theme(s) it covers, more specifically; preceded by “3”.

The system I’m advocating does just this. When I tag each note using this system, I know I want to tag these three specific things about it. Each note should have at least one tag that relates to each of these three points. This makes it very easy to sort and find notes on a granular level.

For example, when I review the below highlight from Jack Kerouac’s book On The Road , I can see at a glance that I’ve tagged all three points. This is a personal note (meaning it’s not work related), it’s a book note, and it’s on the topic of life and travel.

Your own individual tagging taxonomy will be different to mine. But a relatively similar structure is an extremely scalable way of organizing your notes. It takes some time to get used to this, but it’ll soon become second nature.

Finding Specific Notes When it comes to finding notes in the future, there are two features that are especially useful: the search bar and saved searches.

When using the search bar, you can search multiple tags to find exactly what you’re looking for. Let’s say you remember saving a note from a conversation you had with a friend about traveling to Brazil. If you tagged this note properly, the following search would pull up that specific conversation.

This is the real beauty of using this kind of tagging system. Searching for a quote about politics? No problem.

Tip: Placing numbers before tags like this helps you to know that you’ve assigned tags for each of the three areas relating to each note. This ensures you cover all angles to help you find the notes in the future.

For searches you find yourself performing routinely, set up a saved search . To do this, set up your search. At the bottom of the search box, you can also add other parameters such as notebooks, tags, keywords, etc.. Below, I’ve set up a saved search for ideas relating to work.

When your search is complete, on Windows click File > Save Search , On Mac click Edit > Find > Save Search , and name your search. From now on, when you click the search box, you’ll see a link to that saved search to pull up the results instantly. You can also drag the saved search over to the shortcuts widget for even easier access.

Automate Where Possible There’s no point spending more time tagging your notes than is necessary. Luckily, you can automate this in a few areas. The main way of doing this is by using the automation platform IFTTT (if this, then that).

You can use IFTTT to connect different services to your Evernote account. You can then tell the platform to save certain kinds of notes to certain notebooks. It can even assign specific tags.

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I have this set up to save all my Instagram posts to my Reference notebook, and tag these 1personal, 2instagram, 3travel.

I’m also addicted to reading articles on Instapaper , and take a ton of notes on what I read. It therefore makes sense to have another automation set up that saves all of my Instapaper highlights to my CollectionBox notebook, with the tag “2contentnotes”. This saves me some time when it comes to tagging everything in my CollectionBox each week.

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To see a more comprehensive list of how else IFTTT can work with Evernote, see here .

Could This Work for You? This method may not seem quite as simple as just dragging and dropping your notes into vague notebooks. But it is far more scalable. In short:

Save pretty much all of your notes to a “CollectionBox” notebook.

Best Way To Use Evernote

Routinely tag each of your notes, using a taxonomy that works for you. This should explain:

1 What the note relates to.

2 What type of content it is.

3 What themes it covers.

Move the note to one of the few notebooks you’ve set up.

Use these tags to find specific notes in the future.

This tagging system (or something like it) can help you locate specific notes in flash. It keeps everything far more organized than most other systems out there. And it stays organized no matter how many notes you have.

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Evernote Manual

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How Best To Use Evernote

If you decide to go ahead with a system like this, it will take some time to re-organize your Evernote library. But once you’ve got into the routine of tagging your notes like this, you’ll start to realize just how useful Evernote can be.

Best Way To Use Evernote For To Do Lists

Is this a system you think could work for you? If not, how come?

Image Credit: Antonio Guillem via Shutterstock.com

How To Use Evernote