Evernote
Features I want to see in Evernote
I love the power and simplicity of Evernote. Having used it for a little while, I have some suggestions I wanted to share with you (hopefully someone from Evernote sees this, because improvement recommendations sent to their support box seem to get nowhere). You can email notes into Evernote and they get saved into your default notebook. I would love for my Evernote account to have multiple email addresses, each saving a note to a different notebook with particular tags (like a predefined filter).
Be safe when staying in a hotel (part 1)
Having travelled to over 30 countries, I have picked up some interesting tips and tricks about hotel safety over the years. Since the holiday season is approaching and many of you may be travelling, I thought I would write a couple of short, bullet point style articles to help you stay safe. The Preparation Before leaving, I strongly recommend that you make at least 3 photocopies (front and back) of the following documents: Credit cards All tickets (airplane, train, show, etc) Passport Important documents you may be travelling with I would leave one copy with a trusted resource back home ( as a worst case scenario backup) and carry 2 copies with me in different places.
The Getting Things Done (GTD) Weekly Review Process
As a GTD fan, I have read the book, listened to the 10CD audio seminar, read the articles on GTD Times and subscribed to David Allen’s audio blog. In all of these mediums, one of the key messages that seems to come up over and over, is the requirement to do the weekly review. What would happen to your car if you never changed the oil? The car would get sluggish and eventually the engine would die. Same thing for GTD.
Workflowy is a great list manager
Click on any image in this post to see it in full size My regular readers know about my addiction to David Allen’s GTD system. At its core, it is a well defined list management system. My tool of choice for my GTD implementation is Evernote but many of my co-workers and friends have become big fans of a web-based list service called Workflowy. As soon as you login, you will notice a clean and easy to use interface.
Review of the free scan to cloud software - ScanDrop
I am a big fan of Evernote and use it to store all of my reference material (as explained in the GTD methodology). One of the key requirements to my online storage strategy is converting paper into PDF and getting it into Evernote as simply and quickly as possible. A while back I found a free software called ScanDrop which did exactly that. I use it to scan paper directly from my Brother multifunction device and then upload it straight into my Evernote [For Google Docs users, it supports that service too] inbox ready for processing.
How to tag information
There are lots of information management programs out there that ask you to tag your notes, ideas and files (think of Evernote, Springpad, PersonalBrain, etc). Why tag Regardless of the program you use, the purpose of adding tags to your data is to make it more descriptive and therefore easier to organize and find later. Having used 4 or 5 different tools that use tagging, none of them provide any guidance on how to do it efficiently (read best practice). So here is the approach I have adopted.