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Share Your Work

Evernote makes it easy to get other eyeballs on your work and to build on the work that others are already doing. Sometimes the value of sharing lies in the instrumental benefit of saving time and effort. Who wants to slog through an endless cycle of exchanging documents via e-mail when you and your team could simply drop all your notes into a shared Evernote folder? More and more, the value of sharing also lies in building your own professional profile, both within and beyond your organization: as the person who compiles and shares the most useful set of clippings about your new client, or the expert who has built up the best collection of whistle-blower policies on the Internet, or even the oenophile who has lovingly collected reviews of each 2010 California viognier.

Best of all, there is the intrinsic satisfaction of knowing that the hard work you’ve put into compiling notes, reviews, or resources needn’t benefit you alone. All of us now rely on the web to do the background research for many of our personal and professional projects—research that often languishes unused once the project wraps up, the report is written, or the vacation is over. If you have a visceral hatred for wasting the fruits of labor, sharing your Evernote notebooks provides a way of generously spreading your hard work.

Evernote can make it easier to share your work through social media or public notebooks and selectively collaborate with colleagues, clients, or friends in an invitation-only notebook. Each of these can support your professional development by building your profile, strengthening your relationships with current and new colleagues, and showcasing your expertise.

Share Better

If you are already sharing your knowledge, insights, or ideas with the online world—for example, through blog posts, tweets, or Facebook updates—Evernote can make it easier to maintain your social media presence. And if you’ve held back from blogging or tweeting due to the time and effort required, Evernote may make the world of social media look a lot more feasible. Here’s how you can use it to support your smart, useful online presence:

1. Idea file. Maintain a notebook for ideas you have for future posts or updates. If you have multiple channels to fill, you may want a separate ideas file for each one. When I have an idea for a story, I create a new note in the appropriate notebook, using my idea as the title for the note. Then I can quickly scan the titles of all the notes in my hbr.org folder, for example, to see my latest story ideas. If I have a few ideas or sentences to go with my idea, I jot down whatever I’ve got. When I return to the story to start writing, I’m already underway.
2. Interviews. Interviews are great fodder for blog posts and podcasts . . . if you can find the transcripts. Keep your interview notes in Evernote, and they’ll be at your fingertips when you need them. Record interviews as audio notes in Evernote, and you can file them for editing into your next podcast.
3. Drafts. My hard drive used to fill up with separate Word files for each draft. Now I save each draft as a note within Evernote, and use tags or notebooks to collect multiple drafts of a single article in one place.
4. A notebook. You can create a basic social presence by setting an Evernote notebook to shared/public, and sharing the link with the world. Use this to give out nonconfidential work in progress, web clippings related to your work, notes on presentations you’ve attended, or any other collection of notes on a topic of widespread interest.

Using Evernote as part of your blogging or social media presence work flow is more than just a matter of efficiency. I’ve found that by working on my blog in the same place that I do the rest of my day-to-day work, I’m more likely to see the interconnections between that watercooler chat and the post I’ve been drafting. By integrating your social media presence into your daily work routine, it also connects your social media activities with the way you think about your job.

Share with Colleagues

Sometimes the most useful form of sharing isn’t a public online presence, but a more selective collaboration with key colleagues, friends, or clients. Sharing is the essence of teamwork, and in a world where it is becoming so easy—and where more and more business models are built on real-time, distributed collaboration—knowing how to collaborate effectively is a core professional competency. Sharing Evernote notebooks with small groups of colleagues is a great way to build your collaborative capacity because it builds collaboration into an application you’re using constantly. Instead of having to head over to a separate collaboration application or portal, your shared Evernote notebook is sitting right in the sidebar next to all your own documents.

Evernote supports lightweight collaboration by making it easy to share specific notebooks with specific colleagues. To use Evernote as a collaboration tool, you’ll need to upgrade to a Premium account. This allows you to selectively share your notebooks with other people, inviting specific people into specific notebooks and (optionally) giving them permission to add to those notebooks or edit existing notes. (Your collaborators won’t need Premium accounts in order to view or edit your notes.)

Some ways to collaborate with shared notebooks include:

1. Collaborate on drafts. Instead of circulating Word documents, keep your draft documents in a common Evernote notebook. Ask your collaborators to work on the documents within Evernote. It will save each revision so you can always go back to a previous version.
2. Share clippings. As much as we all love opening our Monday morning in-boxes to find a dozen different “read this link” e-mails from our colleagues, Evernote offers a more efficient approach. Set up an Evernote notebook for recommended readings and clip short news items or insights to that notebook; share the notebook with your colleagues, with links back to the original content, instead of just e-mailing individual links. Unlike link sharing via delicious.com or Twitter, Evernote allows you to clip the complete contents of a web page, so your colleagues can access your clippings from their tablets or iPhones while they’re on a plane or subway (as long as they’ve set the clippings file to be an “offline notebook” on their mobile devices).
3. Share templates. Build your team’s effectiveness by creating and sharing a notebook full of document templates (rather than having them live on a network drive or just your own computer). If you and your colleagues frequently have to write the same kinds of e-mails, the same kinds of contracts, or the same kinds of code, or fill out the same kinds of forms, have everyone keep one of each of these documents in a shared Evernote notebook. That way you can build on one another’s work, rather than starting from scratch each time.
4. Share client notes. Many companies and organizations use a customer relationship management (CRM) system to track contact with customers, supporters, or vendors. If your company doesn’t have a CRM, try Evernote as a lightweight alternative. Create a separate notebook for each client or lead, and keep notes on each time you have contact with that company. Encourage your colleagues to do the same, so you can all see one another’s notes.
5. Share minutes. If you regularly meet with the same group of people on your team or project, create a shared notebook for meeting minutes.
6. Share research. Set up a research file for a collaborative project and use it to store all the PDFs of background materials that make for useful reading. Share the file with your team members and encourage them to add to the notebook with their own PDFs or their notes on whichever articles they read.
7. Share travel tips. If your job involves a lot of business travel, the odds are that at least some of your colleagues are on the same circuit and staying in the same company-preferred hotels. Build a collaborative travel guide to the best aspects of each city your team visits often: the name of the concierge who went out of his way for you, the wi-fi password for the café next to the hotel, and the best restaurants for entertaining clients.

Like many of the most useful social web tools, Evernote’s collaborative features come as a bonus to anyone who is using Evernote for her own personal productivity. By making sharing a near-effortless process, Evernote helps anyone become even more effective by leveraging—and contributing to—the wisdom of the crowd.