Evernote Review: The Most Ballin' Cross-Platform Tool Ever
I’ve been using Evernote for about a month now, so I’m by no means a power-user. But this thing is a beast. It has completely overhauled my workflow at the office and at home.
Note on my office setup: I work from an office where I spend most of my time (upwards of 80% of my weeks) either on the phone or in meetings. I currently rock a 13” MBP (2009) with a Core i7, 8GB of RAM and a ginormous hard drive. Most of the time, this monster of a lap top sits in the handy little BookArc (by 12South) plugged into a 27” cheapo monitor. During in-person meetings, I bring my iPad 2 with the Logitech Bluetooth Keyboard/Case.
For my job, I’m constantly facilitating meetings, writing and publishing agendas and minutes from my discussions, tracking action items and coordinating internal resources to complete projects. You would think a tool like Basecamp or MS Project would be my bread and butter, but they don’t even come close to the power of Evernote.
NOTES, NOTEBOOKS, and STACKS: Evernote is organized into a hierarchy of organization. At the lowest level, there are Notes. Notes are what you would expect, free text fields for you to input information such as notes, bulleted lists, pictures, hyperlinks, checkboxes, tables, voice notes, screenshots and attachments. You can also modify text and fonts to fit your desired note taking process.
For me, the best feature are the checkboxes. I use these to manage my action item lists for both work and personal to-dos. I set up multiple checkboxes for completing multi-step action items, and can track progress without loosing track of current steps.
On the other hand, I struggle with the table feature in Notes. Being an excel user since the age of 10, or whenever Windows 95 came out, the tables in Evernote function differently. Evernote lets the tables auto-adjust column widths, and doesn't allow for mass formatting of rows rows or columns. It also lacks any mathematical features that are so common in excel.
All notes are part of a Notebook, pretty obvious right? You can have multiple notebooks for different categories and multiple notes within each notebook. Pretty simple!
Additionally, if you are an anal-sociopath organizer ("like me!" - Joker), you can organize your Notebooks into Stacks. Stacks are series of notebooks, which have series of Notes, which now I've lost track of what I'm talking about. I don't use stacks, except to separate between my personal and work notebooks.
SHARED NOTEBOOKS: A relatively new feature in Evernote is the ability to create shared notebooks with other Evernote users. You can tell e-mail to SHOVE IT, by using this feature by documenting meeting notes in Shared Notebooks. The downside is that it isn't a realtime update process ala Google Docs. So I can't watch someone edit notes in realtime, but it will tell me every time it syncs.
TAGS: In addition to all of these super-easy-to-understand organization tools, Evernote also uses Tags. So if you a complete idiot and decide to put your weekly grocery list in your Things Not To Buy list, if you tag it, you can still find your list full of caviar, artisan cheeses and smoked sausage
CROSS PLATFORM INTEGRATION: Oh yeah, Evernote works on pretty much every gadget/OS you can think of. They even have device integration! AND IT IS FREE! I use it primarily on my Mac and my iPad to take notes. I'll also use it on my iPhone for personal action items.
BEST ADD-ON: SKITCH: The external app that I use the most is SKITCH. It is a simple screenshot tool for Mac and iOS that provides some really great features. And it automatically syncs Evernote in a separate notebook.
QUACK SCORE: 5 Quacks (Awesomeness)
