On a pretty regular basis, I get asked about how I do certain techie things. Many of you tech savvy folks out there will be aware of these, or will use some variant on these tools. A number of folks I know are not aware of or experienced yet using at least one of these, so I thought it would be fun to say a few words about them.

 

1. Evernote

I know people who swear by some note-taking software. If you’ve got a great one, awesome! I have found Evernote to be fantastic and if your tools can do these things, by all means, stick with them.

When I browsing the Web, I want to keep info from a page, but I don’t want to make yet another bookmark or to make a PDF file. I just want to save it to read later. Evernote has a button/extension you can install for your brower, and it will save content you choose – the whole page or parts of it – to your Evernote. You can add a tag and categorize where it goes. Later, just text search something you remember about it, and boom. The waiting room at the dentist’s office becomes reading time space.

I often take notes in meetings, though I’m getting better about bringing a latop for them. On my laptop, I’ll usually take my notes in Evernote. You can attach files, pictures, audio, video, other files (PDFs, etc). When I take handwritten notes, however, which is still common for me, I then take a photo with my cellphone camera (which has gotten super high quality). You may need to practice a bit taking good pics of your notes, but I find it takes me almost no time at all to keep a digital copy of my handwritten notes. PLUS, Evernote processes them (I don’t know how long the delay is between posting and processing), and then you can text-search your handwriting. Yes. It’s awesome.

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