Have you used Evernote before? Personally I’m finding it really valuable and it can do so much more than I imagined!
Far from being just a simple note-taking tool, Evernote has evolved to be a brilliant multi-tasking application that when used wisely can help you to become more efficient and better organised. Not surprisingly, it’s recently been described as a ‘digital brain’ that allows you to keep in one single place all that is important to you. Here are a few ideas you can try to expand your Evernote’s functionality and get the most out it.
- Collect snapshots: use the photo-capture on the Evernote app to save citations from books or articles to use later in your research. You can then add notes, tags and thanks to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) provided by Evernote the text in your snapshots can also be searched.
- Turn your notebooks into a blog: Postach.io is an Evernote-powered blogging platform that allows you to create blog posts from your notes. You can add Google Analytics and Disqus Comments to your Postch.io site and if you are not into blogging yet, this is probably the easiest way to start doing it.
- Add IFTTT recipes: use these time-saving tools to populate your Evernote directly from other applications. For instance, you can use the Twitter one to save all your tweets (or a specific #hashtag) to Evernote after attending a conference. A great recipe for when you are working in projects is to automatically save your files in Dropbox, or starred Gmail messages, to Evernote. There are many more recipes to try, and you can even create your own.
- Get the big picture with Mohiomap: this web application creates interactive mindmaps of your notes, notebooks and tags. If you’re still struggling to organise your notes, this is a great way of navigating through them. You can filter your most recent notes/tags, find connections between your notes, manipulate your content, and create or edit tags.
- See things Clearly: this useful web tool helps to make content you find online clean and easy to read, stripping away all the ads and distracting formatting. Then save it directly to Evernote to read later. Clearly is currently available for Chrome, Safari and Opera only.
- Use tags: if you are not systematic when saving to Evernote, it can easily become out of control. Notebooks are not always the best option to organise your content given that free accounts have a limit of 250 (not enough for some people), and notes can only belong to one notebook at a time. Tags, on the other hand, are more flexible because they are basically unlimited, notes can have multiple tags and they can be organised into groups.
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