I recently held another Evernote training session at my church, this time with the Volunteer Ministry staff. In listening to their desired outcomes, it became clear they needed to consider using more than just Evernote.
I recommended that they adopt three powerful and simple tools to meet their needs: Evernote, Dropbox and Basecamp. Why these three? Because I’ve found that, between the three of them, greater than 80 percent of my work integrates seamlessly for both myself and my workplace teams/departments.
Evernote
Evernote is an application that works on your computer, your phone and your tablet, allowing you to capture your ideas, notes, web pages, pictures and documents into an easily searchable interface. I like to think of Evernote as “my digital brain,” because I now use it dozens of times per day for almost everything. Searching my memory is hit-or-miss, but with Evernote if I capture it, I can find it very easily. Evernote is perfect recall for my not-so-perfect brain.
How do you capture an idea? Action items from a hallway conversation? Due dates shared during a meeting? Chances are you either take a picture, voice record yourself on your phone or write stuff down (on paper or electronically). That’s exactly how Evernote works—for all of it.
But what happens when you want to remember that idea or try to remember what the action item was from that hallway conversation or recall the exact due dates from that meeting? If you’re carrying around a legal pad for notes, recording audio on your phone and then updating your work calendar on your computer, you must find where you captured the information and hope it’s accessible when you need it.
I don’t care how organized you are, if you’re using a bunch of systems and tools to keep track of notes, to-dos and due dates, you’re still at the mercy of your memory and access to that information (wherever you last left it).
Evernote acts as your digital brain, allowing you to capture notes, record audio and drag pictures right into your notes. But it also lets you capture web pages, videos, documents, screen shots, PDF files—almost anything, really. Most importantly, Evernote makes it all searchable. Here’s my computer running Evernote (v 3.5) on my iMac. It also runs on my iPhone and my Macbook Pro laptop, so whatever I update on one device is auto-magically synced and available on my other devices.
Evernote (v 3.5) on my computer allows me to organize my life—not just my work—and helps make everything I capture instantly accessible and searchable on my Mac, iPhone and laptop.
Searching Evernote is more than easy—it’s powerfully easy. When I type in a search for the word “volunteer,” Evernote searches every note looking for the word “volunteer” and gives me all of the results and even highlights where in the note the word appears (see below).
Search for the word “volunteer” returned these results and highlighted the word amidst all of the text to make it really easy to find.
Evernote will even search images I’ve grabbed from a website, presentation, document, PDF file, camera (etc.) and look for the text in the image. In this case, I searched for “Evernote,” and I was shown an image that includes the word “Evernote” in my search results (highlighted so I can see it easier, too).
I searched for “Evernote” and it found the text “evernote” inside of an image and showed it to me in my search results.
Evernote searches pictures for text. In this case, it found the word “love” on a coffee cup.
Evernote offers a free version and two paid versions. Currently, the paid version allows for a monthly fee, a discounted annual plan or a business plan with extra features and functionality.
Dropbox
There’s a good chance you have access to a shared network folder for uploading and downloading files at work, so you may not think you need the file-sharing goodness offered by Dropbox. However, most of the time your work files are protected on a special server with special access for employees only, making it hard to share files outside of your team or department.
Like Evernote, Dropbox works on any computer, tablet or smartphone. Click and drag files or even folders containing files into your Dropbox. That’s it! All you need is an Internet connection. Sharing is simple, too, as you can create a link to any file or folder in your personal Dropbox. These links can then be sent to anyone—even people who don’t use Dropbox. My own Dropbox shows up on my Mac as a destination, so it’s easily accessible.
Dropbox installs right onto my device. I can click on the Dropbox link or open up my Dropbox webpage right from the toolbar icon.
Dropbox has a great free plan, a Pro version (a lot more storage space) or a Team version for the ultimate in file-sharing.
