Fan Friday = Evernote

I live in Pacific Standard Time, which means it is still Fan Friday for a few more hours. So I still have some time to share with you something I’m a fan of. I’ve been doing this every Friday for a few months now and I appreciate how this weekly ritual is challenging me to look around and make note of the people and things I really appreciate AND I think are useful for other people to know.

I’ve been in the habit sharing with you the people I love, people who’ve given great presentations and/or written amazing books.

But today I want to share something different. I want to be a geek today and share an online tool I’m a HUGE fan of.

That tool is Evernote.

Just in case you have not heard of Evernote, just in case you aren’t already using Evernote, you can just hop on over there and create an account right now. Here’s the link, right here. I’ll wait while you go get yourself set up. Of course it is free.

So what does Evernote do exactly? It keeps track of everything you might forget to keep track of. It’s basically an electronic organizer for your brain. It’s a magical software program that lets you keep track of every random note you have from anywhere in your life: post-it notes you left on your desk and random business cards you don’t want to throw out, along with your grocery list and your movies-to-watch-someday list. All around our life, from work to home to car and everywhere in-between, we encounter random bits of information we want to remember. And I used to struggle with all those random notes because I didn’t want to throw them out, but I didn’t know what to do with them. It was quite the stressful dilemma.

Then along came Evernote and saved my life brain. Now I just take a photo of all those random notes with my cell phone camera, and then boom, the photo is uploaded to Evernote and the information is stored forever and ever. You don’t even have to type that recipe into your laptop, you can just take a picture of the recipe and upload it to Evernote. And the best part? Every single photo, text note, diagram, recipe or webpage, is completely searchable by Evernote. So I don’t need to file it in a folder or tag it or label it or DO anything. Evernote will automatically scan the content of every piece of data so I can find whatever I happen to search for later. Their tagline is simple: Remember everything. Capture anything, access anywhere, find things fast.

But Evernote is about more than collecting random scraps of paper. You can upload entire files or even webpages or record audio files. There are dozens of awesome add-on capabilities that let you track all your personal contacts or any other data you might want to organize. My favorite widget is the button I installed to be part of my web browser. Whenever I’m on a webpage I want to “save” I just click on the Evernote button and Evernote saves the image of that current webpage into my account. This is awesome because I don’t always want to bookmark webpages to return to, but I do want to save the article I just read. And with one click of a button I can do just that.

Evernote is also amazing because they have developed a huge user base of documentation. They don’t have a marketing department. Instead, they have a huge training department which serves as their marketing department. They have nurtured a huge online following of fans who post videos showing and explaining how they use Evernote to organize their life and their work. The Amazon Kindle store currently has 9 different ebooks about how to use Evernote. If you can believe it, there have been 7 books published in Japanese about how to use Evernote. Several of those have become bestsellers.

Perhaps the best part of Evernote? It automatically syncs your account from wherever you use it. So you can use your iPhone, your iPad, your MacBook, OR your work computer to enter information into Evernote. And no matter where you enter from, it all gets synced, all the time. You don’t need to keep track of WHERE your data is, because it’s always in just one place: Evernote.

I’ve written before about how I’m approaching my 40th birthday later this year. And I know that with age comes senility and memory loss. So I guess it’s appropriate for me to write about a tool to help me preserve my fragile memory. I guess it’s good for me to keep using Evernote as the primary “backup plan” for my brain. Sooner or later I’m going to need a back-up program.

Before your brain starts failing you, before you start forgetting very important information, you should become a fan like me and convert to Evernote. Here’s their short intro video to give you an overview. You can thank me later.

Tagged as: fanfriday, productivity