Introduction

This short book explains how to make your work more focused and effective with one of the most valuable software tools available today: a web-based notebook—specifically, the popular Evernote application. It shows you the best features and tips for how to capture everything you need to work smarter, prioritize the work that matters most to you, and tap the social web as a powerful tool for collaboration and expression.

Evernote is part of a new generation of social web tools that combine some of the Internet’s newest and most powerful capabilities: accessing your information from any device, collaborating through social content sharing, and organizing your content quickly and easily through keyword-based tags. As a social tool like Twitter, LinkedIn, and others, Evernote makes you not only more effective on your own, but also a more valuable and competent team member.

A web-based notebook is at the heart of this new social toolbox. Think of a web-based notebook as a cross between a traditional paper notebook (easy to use, keeps everything in one place, captures images as easily as text) and a word processor document (legible, searchable, editable) with a swirl of the social web (collaborative, tagable, and accessible online).

If you have ever wasted a minute looking for the notes you jotted down last week, wracked your brain for the name of that supplier you met last month, or wondered what you really accomplished in the last year, a web-based notebook can be a transformative tool. Getting hung up on questions like “where did I put that?” and “what should I really do next?” doesn’t just waste time and energy; it can actually keep you from achieving your full potential. By capturing all your work in one place and organizing it to keep your top priorities front and center, a web-based notebook can help you take charge of all of those thoughts and ideas—and let you take control of your priorities and get ahead in your job—in a way that works for you.

Evernote

Whether you are a new or long-standing Evernote user, this book will teach you tips and show you ways to use Evernote that you’ve never thought of—from practical help on effective note taking to advice on organizing Evernote to support your top priorities. If you’ve already tried Evernote but abandoned it because it’s not clear how Evernote improves your day-to-day work flow, this book aims to give you the guidance and inspiration you need to use it effectively to more closely align your daily work and your big-picture goals.

That’s because the benefits of Evernote go way beyond simple productivity gains, though people do save time and work more effectively when they use a web-based notebook. Merely asking our tech tools for a few extra minutes doesn’t go far enough, not when our computers and software choices frame so much of our workday and so much of our lives. As the place where we do so much of our working and thinking, our tech tools need to help us identify, create, and sustain the kind of work we want to do, to put and keep us on the right career path. Used thoughtfully, Evernote can do just that, by providing a context for the daily reconnection to mission that is advocated by leadership experts like Peter Bregman and productivity gurus like Stephen Covey. A tool like Evernote can help you not so much keep up with your daily onslaught of tasks, but get ahead by helping you to focus on those tasks that are most important to your own personal and professional mission.

In this book, you’ll find ideas on how you can use Evernote to capture everything, organize your notes, and share your work and insights with your colleagues or the world. You’ll learn how to:

• Set up a capture kit that lets you add to or retrieve from Evernote using your computer, web browser, mobile devices, and/or camera.
• Structure your notes with the notebooks, notebook stacks, and tags that keep your top priorities front and center, working from a suggested organizational scheme.
• Share your work more easily by using Evernote to support your blogging and tweeting, and by sharing notebooks from within Evernote itself.

Together, these form your capture habit—your routine for adding notes to and retrieving information from Evernote. The capture habit is what frees your mind from the burden of trying to remember all those stray bits of information. Organizing your notes around your top priorities keeps your work aligned with your professional and organizational goals. Using Evernote to share your work helps you tap the power of collaboration and build your own professional reputation. You can select the pieces of this framework that solve your key challenges, or, to truly transform your professional capacity, you can approach it as a whole: a coherent strategy that brings these three strands of Evernote use together.

This book focuses on Evernote because it’s the web-based notebook that works for the widest range of users (because it’s available for both Mac and Windows users, and on a variety of mobile platforms) and integrates with many other applications and devices. But many of the strategies and practices outlined here are equally relevant to other notebook tools, such as SimpleNote and OneNote, described in the table. More important than the software itself is the way you use that software to support your professional goals and personal work flow.

Some Evernote alternatives

What This Book Is Not, and Where to Learn More

This guide is not a comprehensive Evernote manual, walking you through the many technical features of the Evernote software. Instead, it quickly gives you the big picture of how to use Evernote to work smarter and introduces only those features that will significantly increase your professional effectiveness. It explains how to use those features in ways you may not have considered. It doesn’t have screen shots or step-by-step instructions. Instead, it’s a guide that suggests best practices and the most important things you can and should do with Evernote. If you’re looking for more details on the interface and features not covered here, I recommend Evernote’s excellent online resources, as well as the ebook Evernote Essentials.

Nor is it an extension of any of the established productivity religions, though followers of Stephen Covey, David Allen, and other productivity gurus will find many techniques that fit into their work flows. (Getting Things Done [GTD] adherents will also be interested in Dan Gold’s Evernote: The Unofficial Guide to Capturing Everything and Getting Things Done, and Braintoniq’s The Secret Weapon.) And while some of the suggestions can help you keep your home and family life organized (a topic that you can explore in more depth by checking out A Mom’s Guide to Evernote), this book is primarily focused on using Evernote to support your professional development and effectiveness. Work Smarter with Evernote is the only Evernote guide that focuses on using the tool not just for immediate productivity gains, but for building long-term professional success.

Finally, as an application that runs on multiple platforms and devices, each version of Evernote works a bit differently, and this book is not a comprehensive guide to each one. Depending on which version of Evernote you’re using, your interface may work slightly differently from what is described here. For example, with the arrival of Evernote 5.0 for your Mac (in November 2012), the new “Shortcuts” feature makes it even easier to prioritize your key notebooks, stacks, and notes. As the platform evolves you may find new ways to adapt the way you use Evernote, based on the principles outlined in this book.

About Me

The guidance in this book draws on my personal experience using Evernote for over four years, as well as my professional experience working in the social web since it first developed as a concept—and even before. From my PhD research at Harvard, where I began my dissertation work by investigating the impact of the Internet on the modern workplace, to my role leading social media for online research giant Vision Critical, I have spent sixteen years helping professionals and organizations work more effectively online.

Evernote has been a core part of the toolkit I use, and of the toolkit I recommend. When I started using Evernote in 2008 (and wrote my first blog post about it), the service had just 250,000 users; as of this writing, it’s got 34 million. In those four years, I have trained thousands of people in how to use social web tools such as Evernote to transform both their own work and the businesses and organizations they work for. In my work at Vision Critical, we’ve used Evernote for everything from collaborating on presentations to sharing data sets among colleagues.

I also blog about social media and productivity for Harvard Business Review, and one look at the comments on my hbr.org blog shows how many people are struggling with the challenges of information overload—challenges that Evernote can help to address. The strategies in this book aim to answer those challenges and, in fact, draw on reports from my own on- and offline colleagues about the professional payoffs of using Evernote and other social tools.

This book will help you achieve both the productivity wins you can get by adopting some of the tricks I share here and the big-picture professional gains of working in a more focused, intentional way. Evernote can support both sides of that equation, if you know how to use it to capture, organize, and share your work as effectively as possible.