It took me a long time to get Evernote. I felt like with Simplenote and Notational Velocity, why would I need to complicate my note taking with yet another app. Two things made me revisit Evernote, Tim Falls uses it religiously and he is one of the most productive people I know and SimpleNote sync had started to become slow and unreliable for me. In this post I’ll share three key use cases that have made Evernote a welcome part of my workflow.
Attending Events
In particular, the offline notebook feature (this requires a premium subscription) is what makes using Evernote valuable for managing events. As a Developer Evangelist with SendGrid, I attend a ton of events and managing them all is non-trivial; especially, while at the event. It’s a given that for portions of any event, Internet access will be flaky at best.
Prior to each event I store all the key details about the event into an offline notebook, such as:
- Agendas and schedules
- Maps from my hotel to the venue and surrounding areas
- List of people I want to meet and their contact information.
- Hotel & Airline information.
- Key pieces of information from the website, or sometimes I’ll just store the entire website in Evernote.
Managing Business Cards
I dislike carrying around any type of paper, even business cards. Yet, I don’t always have time to input all the business cards into digital format, especially while attending the event. As a compromise, I used take pictures of the business cards with the iPhone camera, but the problem is that then I have a bunch of business cards mixed in with my other pictures and it becomes easy to lose any sense of organization. So instead, I’ll create a note in Evernote for that event and take the photo from within the app, adding any relevant notes.
Managing Receipts
In the same way I manage the business cards, I do the same with receipts.
I also found the Mac Power Users Podcast episode dedicated to Evernote to be valuable in discovering the virtues of Evernote.