EverNote: Forget Me Not

One of my biggest problems in a typical day is keeping track of the seemingly endless list of things I need to remember. The truth is we live in a fast paced, adrenaline fueled society that demands we juggle 50 things at once.  I will also admit to be less than perfect in the self organization department. Despite my endless attempts at writing notes on the nearest piece of paper, leaving myself voice mail reminders and emailing thoughts out as soon as they pop into my head I still manage to loss some piece of information from time to time. Until now......

A few months ago I read an article about a service called EverNote describing it as a ubiquitous note capture tool. The description and review seemed to place it in the category of just another attempt at retaining bits of information much like most email clients offer as a peripheral function. But over the next few weeks I continued to hear good things about the app and so last week I decided to give it a spin. It wasn't long after signing up that I found myself using the free service for pretty much everything I need to capture during my day. And I mean I use it everywhere for pretty much anything I can think of needing to hold on to.  Here are some examples:

• With the desktop app on my laptop I can drag and drop emails from Outlook into Evernote.
• The mobile web interface allows me to jot down notes on my BlackBerry.
• I started using the Web Clipper Bookmarklet which is smart enough to save only the content you have highlighted on a web page into your new note.
• The service gives you a custom email address you can send notes to.

Needless to say I am impressed by the flexibility of the service. It is simple enough to use but there is quite a bit of "smart" underneath the hood of Evernote to make the app a powerhouse as a productivity tool.  For example, yesterday I discovered that the service actually indexes content in images and therefore makes them searchable. How cool is that? Just snap a picture of a whiteboard with notes on it, upload it to EverNote and the content is now searchable as if you typed it into a document. The screenshot on the right is my simple example of what I am talking about. I took a picture of my Blockbuster card, uploaded it to Evernote, logged in and searched "membership". It pulled up my image and highlighted the search content! Pretty amazing stuff.

So, if your like me and find it tough to keep track of everything that comes your way in the course of a day this service may be just what you need. Hey, what do you have to lose? The basic service is free.