Giving Evernote a shot

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Giving Evernote a shot

By Steve Belt 13

I take notes on yellow legal pads for each phone call. These rough notes remind me who I talked to, their phone number, hopefully what property it is regarding, etc.. The trouble is, the legal pads are in the office, so that when I’m at home, in the car, wherever, away from my notes, I don’t have John Doe’s number handy.

Via Twitter, I was alerted to Evernote. I immediately understood how it could help me, so I asked for a beta invite and was granted one pretty quickly. So far, I’ve transferred all of my hand written notes to Evernote, which is great. I can now search those notes, and hopefully find names, numbers, email addresses, etc., for stuff I have captured. Let’s hope anyway.

For my needs, Evernote’s primary appeal is that is is online (and thus visible via the web from any computer).  I’m not using it much more differently than I might use Wordpad to do the same thing, again, except that it saves my notebook online.  Evernote can create multiple notebooks, thus I suppose I could do a notebook per call, or maybe per property, but what I really want is one ginormous log, otherwise the effort to name each notebook I create would be too much effort to bother with. Sure it might be nice for indexing and such, but I don’t need that as much as I just want to be able to quickly search a name or address.

So I like just having one notebook.  This brings me to the desire for a super-handy feature of the notebook, which is to have individual journal entries that were time stamped, automatically. This would capture my phone log better. Far better. I’d definitely love that feature.  It looks like I want to use Evernote in a way it wasn’t intended to be used (today), but the notion of lots and lots of tiny notebooks, just to keep my phone log doesn’t make much sense to me.

At any rate, if you want to try out Evernote, I can shoot you a beta invite. Just let me know.  It definitely has a bunch of features I’m not using right now.  I’m hoping that when I win my iPhone, I’ll be using Evernote all the time when I’m on the go.

13 COMMENTS

comments user
Christoph Schweiger

Hey, could you shoot me an invite. I need to get organized and think that I could use “A” tool…

comments user
Steve Belt

Invite Sent!

comments user
Wade Munday

Steve,

I’ve got the same problem. All my calls/notes are on yellow pads, which is almost worthless when trying to find the name/number of a prospect, vendor, or random idea that I had a month ago.

Have you tried Microsoft’s One Note?

comments user
Steve Belt

Wade, I’m going to look into One Note. Thanks for the suggestion.

comments user
Randy Johnson

Onenote is a great notes program, but doesn’t have the cool online synchronization and you cannot login to a website to see your notes. You may be able to do so with a share point server, it’s not easy like evernote.

comments user
Steve Belt

Randy, I think agree. I downloaded the free trial for One Note, and then quickly figured out it wasn’t the solution I was looking for. On top of that, Microsoft wants $100. I’m not opposed to buying software, when it serves my needs, but One Note doesn’t seem to do anything I need it to do. Google Notebook, however, just might be a tad better for my needs than EverNote…I’m going to test both out side-by-side to see if I find I like one over the other. Thanks to Dave Smith in Tucson for suggesting it to me via Twitter today.

comments user
Jon Griffith

I’d like to give Evernote a shot…got more invites?

comments user
Steve Belt

Jon,

Sure thing…I sent it along. FYI, I still have 18 more invites.

comments user
Gay Potter

Reading your blogs is like going to school – you are a great and do all the research first! Now as I read this blog – I am thinking – this would be wonderful for one who’s is accelerating in age and the memory gets a bit hazy! My cure has been hormones not evernote! I will have to add this!

comments user
Steve Belt

Gay, I’m still using EverNote. In fact, I used EverNote to compose my “class notes” for the blogging workshop last Friday. I didn’t refer to them at the workshop, but I composed my script on EverNote.

These days, I get mad at myself for not noting something in EverNote. It’s very, very handy to be able to go back to one place to see all of your notes.

On this blog, I tend to use it to make observations about things I’ve found handy in the past. Thanks to Twitter, a few people will see when I post, but it’s all because of Twitter.

comments user
Heather Rankin

Yes! Please shoot me an invite. Sounds like the solution i’ve been looking for. Still new and still working on my systems to get it all done.
Heather@heatherrankin.net

Cheers!
H

comments user
Steve Belt

Heather-

I sent you an invite. Hope Evernote works well for you.

comments user
Candace Robinson

I love Evernote and can’t live without it! I share it with everyone!

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