While I’m out and about, or at my day job (which of course, I’m praying I’ll be free of by this time next year, as I get my first book published and my first screenplay sold and I’m VERY BUSY this time next year, scoping out possible houses to buy in New England)…. I often am jotting down a MILLION notes, thoughts, scene fragments, and to-do’s on any available piece of paper.
I have a notebook for that purpose, but sometimes I’m somewhere without the notebook, and I get an idea.
Write it down.
Up until now, I’ve used a very cool program called “Notebrowser” to keep track, and Cintanotes before that. Last year, my new Dell laptop (replacing several years’ reliance upon bloated HP computers) came with OneNote. I moved to that immediately. Indeed, I began going into Notebrowser and finally cleaning it out, with the intention of deleting it.
Of course, the need to get 1,667 to 3,000 words a day into my books puts an effective barrier into that.
So, I liked OneNote, but I didn’t like that it was a full screen app, and not a program. It made it VERY difficult to use it effectively.
Recently I discovered that the OneNote I had wasn’t the full program, but rather a “lite” version from the Windows App store, installed as a factory setting with Windows 8.1… More on that later
So, since I took a Michael Hyatt webinar recently, he pushed of course Scrivener and Evernote. Scrivener I’m already a believer in. I downloaded Evernote during the webinar,, but I didn’t install it for a couple of days.
A couple of days ago, i installed it, and began to play around with it. I resolved to move everything instead over to Evernote, and installed the “Clipper” function in my Opera browser. Now, I can directly store things into it. Normally, I print to PDF, but the Evernote way has an advantage… I can find it quicker.
The concept of notebooks and stacks was easy to figure out, by thinking of a stack as a multi-subject notebook, and the notebooks as the individual subject sections.
Ta-da!
MUCH easier. Now, supposedly, I can scan or take pictures of all my handwritten notes, and Evernote will OCR them – in other words, read them and copy it into Evernote, allowing me to delete the images.
But since I suddenly came up with an idea of a kid’s book, my odd little sketches of strange little animals won’t get deleted or thrown away any longer!
