Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking for tools to really take advantage of our iMac and try to get our life more organized.  It’s so easy to get in a “digital rut” of using the same programs each day and miss out on all the new innovation.  So when I heard Evernote mentioned on Macbreak Weekly I decided to try it out.

Evernote is simply a filing cabinet for all your digital stuff.

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

Rather than go over it’s features and do a typical review, let me give examples of how I use it for our family.

• Taxes – I’ve been debating whether to fill out a Schedule C for our taxes in order to write off the expenses of our website.  The first task for doing this is to gather all our receipts.  Since every expense is online I went to these accounts, selected the text in the web browser, and then clicked the Evernote button on our Firefox plugin.  This gives you a popup window where I put a title to the receipt and then tagged it “2008 taxes”.  After a quick sync with our Evernote app on the iMac, all our expenses are easily accessible.
• Family Trip Ideas – Whenever I think of some place we might want to go when the weather gets warmer I got to their website and click that Evernote button again.  I tag it “family” and “outings”.  While bookmarking does the same thing, this allows me to search the content of the page itself for every outing idea I saved in Evernote.
• Email – I am always sending email to myself with ideas for blog posts or reminders for a DIY project, etc.  When you signup for Evernote you get a unique Evernote email address.  Whenever I send something to that address it gets stored in my filing cabinet.
• More Email – At work I receive a weekly newsletter.  This is where I find out about company events or special group ticket offers to local sports.  I forward these to Evernote so I can check them at home.
• Cell Phone – I put an Evernote contact in my phone and can now text myself notes or take photos of stuff like a price/item number of something we’re thinking of buying or a whiteboard diagram at work.  If your cell phone has a good camera, Evernote will ‘read’ the text in a picture, making it searchable.

Everything that goes into Evernote is available anywhere.  Stuff I file at work is available at home or from any computer where you can log into the Evernote website.

I keep finding more and more uses for Evernote, but the most valuable right now is savings receipts for our taxes and as a repository for family trip ideas.  Now I can do some surfing during lunch at work and easily save the information in Evernote to make it available from home. In the past I always emailed this information to myself and found my mailbox was overflowing with emails from myself.  While I could search this email, there was no easy way to scan it by title or tag.

The best part is that Evernote is free.  Try it out, see if it fits, and keep going.  There is a premium version that costs $5/month or $45 per year that supports more file types, larger storage capacity, and a few other benefits.  The only problem I’ve had so far is that I can’t drag drop an email into Evernote using the basic version, but I am able to forward the email into my Evernote account.

I’d love to have more ideas for how to use Evernote and also other cool programs you are using.  Please share your ideas in the comments.

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