One of the key tools I have for organization is Evernote. I’ve written before about how I’ve tried every PIM program and organization program out there. Sidekick? I had it. Loved it. Couldn’t afford it at the time. Used the demo until it ran out. Still kind of miss it.
I took a Michael Hyatt seminar a couple of years ago where he mentioned two of his favorite tools for writing – Scrivener and Evernote. I was already using Scrivener so I gave Evernote a try. I’d been using two other programs for organization, ideas and note taking – Agenda At Once and a program whose name I can’t remember – it basically had several tabs with different windows within it for note taking. You just chose what window would be for what category. I liked that one a lot, but I was forgetting to open it for days at a time, and that’s a good sign it’s really not working with your organizational system.
I was beginning to use OneNote and wasn’t that happy with it at all, as I mentioned last week. So I downloaded Evernote and gave it a try.
Since Evernote came with a “web clipper” that saved articles on the internet, I installed that. I’ll say this – I use Opera browser. I gave up on Chrome because I was essentially calling Google up and telling them, “I just checked my news, and now I’m going to go to the writing forum…”. Opera and Chrome are the same engine, just Opera has some perks like the Speed Dial that I love. Evernote at first only had a plugin for Chrome, and it worked just fine in Opera.
I actually deleted OneNote off my hard drive the next day. Evernote imported My OneNote data, and I was off and running.
Evernote is literally the first program I began to pay the premium fee for! I began clipping articles on writing, screenplay writing, and anything I was researching. Need to take a note? Evernote. Get a bonus at work? Track my expenditures in Evernote until it’s done. Birthday list? Evernote, then email it right from Evernote to my wife. Goals? List them in Evernote.
Evernote takes some explaining. Evernote is designed to be a note page, fortunately without the lines or perforated holes like OneNote had. All your notes are installed in a default notebook. To organize yourself, make notebooks for every category. Those you can see in the left hand window, essentially a filing cabinet for your notebooks.
The notebook itself is the middle column, and the right column the page of the notebook you’re taking notes on.
Have a bunch of notebooks you decide you want to bundle together? No prob – just add a master notebook and drag those notebooks to it – now you have a note stack. I have a stack for Writing, then multiple note books inside it, and of course, hundreds of notes in each notebook.
The Web Clipper is to me the key. I can save MOST website articles. It takes a little fiddling with some websites. You can choose to save the entire article, or save it in a simplified format (I do that as a default). It recognizes Amazon pages and has a default format just for that. And if I only need a quote, I can select the quote, then clip to evernote.
I’ve actually used Evernote to plan out writing projects. Thanks to a chat feature, I was able to share a notebook with my producer and get feedback immediately as I worked on the plans for the project.
Evernote is where I keep login and passwords – it is now my life saver. When my computer began crashing in September and I had to start over again, the first thing I literally did each time was install Evernote so I could get my passwords. All those questions you have to answer when you log into a website? Evernote.
It’s no surprise that Michael Hyatt calls Evernote ‘his brain on the internet’. I feel roughly the same way.
I realized within two months that I was using Evernote so much on the free plan that I literally was going ten days a month with my bandwidth maxed out. After only three months on the free plan, I made a leap I’d never done for any free program before – I moved to the premium plan.
I’ve only once or twice maxed out the current plan I’m on, so I don’t need to move to the business plan. I can see where that would ge a great option, but right now I’m happy where I’m at.
Evernote is a key tool for every novelist and writer. I simply can’t imagine trying to do this many projects without it!
How do you keep yourself organized? What program do you use?
