Managing Information with Evernote

You jot down notes from a meeting on a notepad. You attend a conference and scribble notes on the conference notepad. You are in a book store and see a book you want to remember. You drink a great bottle of wine when dining out and want to remember it. You snap a photo of a plant in the Arboretum that you want to add to your garden. You find a Web site that applies to a course you're teaching. You receive an email message with tips for using SAS for that large data file you use in your research.

What do you do with all those pieces of information? If you're like most people, they pile up on your desk, get placed in multiple physical files, and usually become extremely difficult to retrieve and use.

If this sounds like you, you might want to investigate Evernote (http://evernote.com).

 Evernote is another example of software hosted by a company that--at the basic level--is free. (Note that it is hosted by a third-party company, so be careful with information that should not be entrusted to a third-party.) At the basic level, Evernote allows you to upload 40M per month, share your notebooks with other people in read-only mode, store PDFs, images, audio, or ink files, and limits any single note to 25M. For $5/month or $45/year, you can store any file format, upload up to 500M/month, increase the single note size limit to 50M, share your notebooks in read and edit modes, etc. For a summary of the free vs cost features, see http://www.evernote.com/about/premium/

Evernote might be most useful if you have a smartphone and can take advantage of the ability to snap a photo and upload it from the mobile device. (That book, wine, or plant that you want to remember are a few examples of how that might be useful.) You can also take photos of whiteboards/blackboards, flipcharts, and other information that you want to record without having to transcribe. Evernote includes text-recognition within images.

To get started, I found it useful to register for the Web interface (required to use the software on any platform), download the desktop software, and install the Firefox plug-in (so you can save clips from or entire Web pages). If I had a smartphone, I would also have downloaded the mobile application.

Evernote creates a default notebook for you. I found it useful to create some notebooks I know I want to collect information into, and then add the notes. It is, however, easy to move notes from one notebook to another. Notes can also live in multiple notebooks. You can also assign tags to every note so that you can search your collection based on those tags. It took me a little while to realize that you can have "child" tags so that you can develop a hierarchy of search terms.

I also found it useful to look for tutorials available on YouTube (http://youtube.com). I particularly found a series of YouTube videos called "How I Use Evernote" to help me imagine ways the software might be useful: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+i+use+evernote&aq=f

If you find yourself collecting scraps of paper, email messages, and other files that would be useful if only you could find them again, check out Evernote. It might help.