Sometimes it is not the grandiose “paradigm shifting” technologies that make a difference in life and work, it is the simpler things – the technology with humble aspirations and claims.
About a year or so ago, I decided that I was tired of the way I had been tracking the tidbits of my working life. This mostly consisted of filling yellow and white pads of lined notebook paper with scribblings and notes from client and internal meetings and calls, in penmanship that only a doctor could read (I am not a doctor, and don’t even play one on TV, but do come from a family of doctors, so sloppy writing may well be an inherited trait).
This worked OK for awhile, at least until I realized that it was very hard to go back and find the right information in the right notepad. I filled so many of these over the years that I ran short of space and wound up piling the older ones into an abandoned filing cabinet in the corner of my office to make room for the new ones, creating kind of a sad, leaning tower of old notepads
I thought: “there has to be a better way,” and “doesn’t there exist some kind of note taking software that will make this all easier?” Word processing seemed at once to be overkill – too many features, and too much overhead in saving and organizing files. The Notepad text editor was clearly under kill.
I poked around online a bit, and found that there is indeed an established note-taking category of software. In fact MS had an nth generation product that had gotten some very nice reviews. And then there were all the shareware freebies.
Long story short, I went the “free” route and somehow found and selected Evernote for Windows.
Evernote has made a tremendous difference in how I organize and take notes. I found Evernote right around the same time my employer Fusion PR set me up with a laptop. So I can take my laptop with me into meetings, wherever I go, and capture all the essential details. There’s no need to worry about saving my notes, or assigning names to files. I can categorize them if I wish, by client, project, etc., and the program automatically saves as I type. It has full text searching, and supports “clipping” from Outlook and other applications.
If I really wanted to push the envelope I could experiment with “digital ink,” and various forms, like To Do lists, Phone Messages, etc.
But I don’t need to conquer the world with this particular piece of software. It does a very nice job in a very specific area, and in doing so empowers me because suddenly I seem to have instant recall (and others have great fun watching as I awkwardly and furiously hunt ‘n’ peck out my notes – well anyway, at least they can read it when I am done!)
I write all this because I like to acknowledge things that make a difference (no, they are not a client), and also because I saw a post on the New web 2.0 Magazine, Extend Your Brain with Evernote, that talks about a new Web version, apparently now in invitation-only beta – Sign me up!
