I got introduced to Evernote by Michael Hyatt at one of his seminars. I had thought at first, “um… I can do all that research in Scrivener. And it’s better that way.” Plus I had Microsoft One Note.
But if you decide nobody can teach you anything, you’re right. It’s self fulfilling. So, I went and tried it.
Since I’m a nuts and bolts software guy like Michael Hyatt, I looked for and downloaded the browser plug in.
I deleted One Note the day after that.
How does Evernote work?
Evernote gives you a basic user interface. Think of it as a filing cabinet. We’re already preprogrammed to think that way, since that’s the architecture that Microsoft still uses.
But instead of business like manila file folders, Evernote thinks in terms of notebooks.
Notebooks
You start out with one notebook. You can add about a thousand, I think it is. So, add one notebook for your “home searching notebook”, where you store all your Zillow bookmarks.
Another for your Writing articles.
Another for screenplay writing.
Another one for Movie Ideas.
Another for “Novel project notes”.
I have 50 notebooks in my Evernote, all for different subjects. I’m tempted to add one called “tin foil hat”, for the weird conspiracy theory stuff I run into from time to time, because there’s novel ideas in all of that!
Notes
You can capture different kinds of notes – screen captures (important for the house hunting), bookmarks (important for finding the free grammar classes you don’t have time to take anyway), article, simplified article (my default) and Amazon. The Amazon article choice appears only on one website. Can you guess which one?
Bookmarks I tag with the tag “bookmarks” (More on tagging in a minute).
Screen Captures can be annotated within Evernote through a graphic interface. I don’t ever really do that, but it’s there if you need it.
And yes, all those web site pages you’ve printed to PDF on your hard drive? you can move them to Evernote.
Apparently, you can do ink notes, webcam notes and audio notes. I guess if you add the app to your phone, you can take a video note of you saying, “Buy three eggs for dinner” or something. Or film a rocky outcropping and say, “like this for the sword fight scene.” I’ve never done it, because I haven’t put the app on my phone. I’m just not one of those people that walks around glued to their phone.
Note Stacks
You can also bundle ALL of your writing notebooks into a Note Stack. This is like when you rubber band two notebooks together in a file drawer because they contain information that’s related.
So, not only can you organize by notebook, you also can bundle all of them together by related information. Your writing articles in one notebook, your writing resources in another, screenplay writing in a third – all in one note stack.
Your information is only as good as your ability to find and process that information.
Tagging
Now, here’s where Evernote shines.
Tagging. You can add tags to every article. Such as your house hunting notebook (because every writer wants to get out of “here” and buy a house “There”). You can add state tags and city tags (say, “Iowa” and “Dubuque”). You can add tags to your writing articles – “Character” “plot” “verbs” “Adjectives” “need to read again” “to read later”. And any tag you want to see listed at the top of your tags, you can add punctuation to the title of the tag, such as “.read later”.
Then you can search all your articles marked “.read later” – and there they are. If one is PRESSING that you MUST READ – you can set an alarm on it to ring later on. I’ve done this several times.
All my bookmarks get tagged with the tag “book Mark”. So when you’re trying to wade through 3,045 notes (the amount I have in Evernote right now) and you want to just find the free grammar classes, click on the tag “book marks”, and… There it is. I think the limit of tags you can have is 9999.
Do some simple math and you’ll see that you can have a LOT of notebooks and a LOT of tags, for a LOT of capabilities.
Remember, the ability to STORE information is divided by the EASE of finding that information again!
Evernote gives you only so much free bandwidth per month. I kept running into my max right around the 20th of every month. I upgraded to the first paid level, and now I’m right where I need to be, and don’t EVER come close to maxing out my Evernote. I’ve never even come close to the limit to need to upgrade to the business level.
An additional benefit to Evernote is – when my Windows 8.1 got corrupted last year and I had to spend a frantic month putting everything back together and frantic searching for information, everything I had in Evernote was instantly restored. I began to move registration numbers of purchased software into my Evernote, so that I’d never run the risk of losing that ever again.
I have maps of foreign countries in my Evernote, clips from Google Maps street view, website bookmarks, registration numbers for software, articles for writing and screenplay writing. You can even utilize the timer and tagging functions to track submissions to agents and publishers, if you’d like.
Templates
I almost forgot templates. I found out about the templates function about a month into Evernote. Evernote really doesn’t have a way to have templates. But if you create a notebook called templates and store some of the notes some people have formatted for you, you can right click and copy those unlimited times to other notebooks. Great if you want to Journal in Evernote.
There’s even “Save The Cat” and “Planning your novel” templates available. “World building”. You name it. I downloaded all the free templates I could find that I thought were useful to me.
One feature of Evernote that is the most important to me – if you spend any time not currently online, Evernote is your only choice. You have access to ALL of your notes, notebooks, clippings and tags while offline.
What I thought was a very limited piece of software the first ten minutes I had it has turned literally into “my brain on the internet”.
You can take pictures of business cards and store it in Evernote. Can’t remember your license plate? Evernote. Michael Hyatt has written an entire series of articles of things you can do with Evernote, including packing lists for road trips, phone interviews for seminar planning, lists of items you need for your seminar, the seminar outline (put that on a Kindle, and you can page through it as you do the seminar), movie scripts, log lines for elevator pitches (you can send a note to another user – REALLY important if you find yourself in an elevator with Jerry Bruckheimer – you show him your logline pitch on your Evernote phone app, and he says… “can you send that to me?” Click of a button…), create a shared folder and every note you place in that shows up on your producer’s phone, etc.
And the worst thing is, I still haven’t scratched the surface of what you can do with this program.
And the funny thing is, most Evernote users will look at my list and say, “Hey! You left out the most important features!”
Did I mention checklists? and…
