Evernote

I am a big believer in the Getting Things Done Productivity Model. Using Evernote to capture and organize all my thoughts has lead to me being a lot more productive. I really like how I can share and collaborate my notes as well as have a note book of thoughts I can reference for when Ihave time to think about them.

I started using Evernote years ago, accessed it from mobile, of course, plus multiple PCs. I loved it. It helped me out of so many jams because I had the info I needed at my finger tips. I hate to admit it but I didn't look for a replacement until the pricing model changed. Microsoft's OneNote was a "good enough" alternative for me to make the switch and it was free.

I use Evernote every day in my business. I love the fact that it allows me to take notes on multiple devices and they stay in-sync with each other. My favorite feature of this app is the capability to search through all of your notes like a Google search. The OCR (ocular character recognition) even detects words in scanned-in handwritten notes. Evernote is pretty amazing.

This program is great to create notes and lists that can be shared by multiple users. You can use it on multiple platforms and add reminders as well.

I learned about Evernote from a coach that I followed at the time. This was how they communicated and kept shared notes among their team. What it is: Evernote is a big digital journal. It's similar to Microsoft OneNote and Notion.so in some regards, in that it allows you to categorize journal entries, keep lists and checklists, organize research, paste images, and organize topics of thought. It prevents busy executives and all kinds of people from having to lug lots of notebooks around. This is only used in a management capacity to keep and organize plans and notes on topics and business plans. Pros: Journal organization - Evernote allows you to organize your topics and thoughts into digital notebooks. Integrations - Evernote works with Google Chrome and can help you search, clip, and paste things into your journals. Cons: Organization - Items are organized by notebook and journal entry, but sometimes it can still feel a little disorienting when searching for items. Image clippings - For some odd reason, this functionality does not work for the team members that use it. Some possible use cases: This has allowed us to keep tabs on account histories, plans, and lists together in one place. That helps save time and increasing efficiency. Evernote has allowed us to store a lot of different types of media together to create one brainstorming board for future projects. This helps create new ideas for revenue. How we use it now: We migrated to Evernote whenever our office started using macs. The user functionality was roughly the same - and we found it easy to understand and use. We use Notion.so more frequently now - this allows our office to have an internal hub, a place for journal entries/lists/ and media. It's more visually driven and organized (for creatives that have a visual memory), and the search function is easier to use. Overall, as a team, we're getting more functionality out of Notion.so, but we still appreciate Evernote for its usage as well. Overall: Evernote would be one of my top 3 note-keeping software tools to recommend for keeping journal entries, brainstorming, developing lists, and developing plans across time. There's a mobile app so that you can access and take notes wherever you go. You can search and keep images and text, as well as upload files and other features. For busy admins, execs, and moms, this is a great digital notebook to keep tabs on work and life in one centralized place. Evernote is not a great software tool to use if you need: Multi-user functionality - Individual user management to specific items or pages (a virtual project management software solution would be better for that). A more clear hierarchical structure of your documents and notes. If you need to separate records and keep them accessible and linked to other aspects of the project (ex: This isn't individual documents, like google docs). If you are a "paper person" and are extremely visually organized (in which case, we'd advise you use a moleskin notebook). Spreadsheets - like for a lot of side by side data analysis (ex: This isn't google sheets).

I have been using Evernote since the mid 2000s. Really have enjoyed the ability to just scan and file and forget it and always be able to find with their rich search capabilities. Highly recommend.