Will Kelly

While my objections to taking meeting minutes are well documented, my job as a technical writer means I am an inveterate note taker and researcher. Evernote has been a godsend to me in many ways because of its growing feature set. It has helped me consolidate a lot of my previous efforts to stay organized and on on top of things.

I rely heavily on Evernote’s iPad and iPhone clients plus my Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M scanner for making the most out of Evernote.

Organize and track medical and doctor information. For somebody who has always been better organized electronically than they have with paper files, Evernote has been a godsend and a go to app for organizing, maintaining, and tracking all the information about my Doctor visits related to my Thyroidectomy, Synthroid, diet, and related information.

Store project archives. I use Evernote to archive old projects like articles and blog posts for future reference and retrieval. It comes in handy when I want to reuse background information or research.

Store writing samples. Since I work across multiple PCs, I keep a stash of writing samples in PDF format in Evernote making them easily accessible.

Capture online research. I was a big Delicious user for years but when Yahoo’s attempt to sunset the service left their future uncertain, I moved all my online research (medical, technical, or otherwise) to Evernote and like it much better especially when I want to consult some information when I am on a client site and just have my personal iPad.

Capture personal notes. “Evernote is my brain” is more than just a marketing tagline for me since I use it regularly to capture personal notes about stuff I need to remember or want to explore further.

Capture professional notes (sorta). One of my goals in 2011 was to  capture more of my professional notes from meetings electronically versus on paper. I am not quite there and in fact well behind schedule. Part of it is probably because I work on a federal government project

Capture volunteer meeting notes. While my move to forgo paper note taking isn’t progressing so well on the personal or professional fronts, I’ve moved all the note taking from my volunteer meetings to Evernote. Even when I take notes in Penultinate, I then send the notes as a PDF to Evernote.

Create and store article and blog post ideas. Many potential blog post and article ideas come to be when I am mobile so I capture them in Evernote using either my iPad or iPhone.

Store receipts for business expenses. I make it a habit to store receipts for business expenses in Evernote whether I can them into PDF or save them as PDFs. It has really made a difference for me at federal tax time.

Capture tweets. Seesmic for iPhone easily won my love because it enables me to save tweets to Evernote. When I am checking out my Twitter stream and see a link to an article or site I want to check out later.

How do you use Evernote?