Getting Organized With Evernote
Posted on 30. Aug, 2010 by Nathan W. Armes in Blog: On Assignment
I am one of the most unorganized people I know. The polar opposite of everyone in my family. Over the past few years I have slowly gotten remarkably better at organizing my life.
As my professional career has become busier and clients become higher profile and demanding working more organized and efficiently has become a characteristic that I’m striving to perfect and master. I used to look at those highly organized people as freaks of nature, now I look at those same folks as forces of nature set to take over the world with the help of a color coded binder and meticulously dated notebooks.
In talking to and reading about these forces of nature a common story thread shines through; living life as a highly organized person and business owner is very hard work, it did not happen over night and no they were not born carrying a day planner.
You have to find a system that works for you and your business first – and that system is very rarely made up of random scraps of paper, cocktail napkins or the back of your ink stained hand filled with email addresses, important contact info and dates.
The first step I took was to get rid of the clutter. If you work from home, such as I do many days out of the week, that clutter included junk surrounding my desk and work space. I use the term junk loosely because anything that is a distraction – squirrel – is considered junk in my book. Get rid of the junk to find the focus that is needed to become organized.
Organized people are more likely to be focused people, read type A.
In ridding my workspace of clutter (which to many still looks like a hodgepodge of pictures, books and nicknacks but I find focus in items that inspire me creatively and professionally) I found lost business cards, old notes and a variety of calendars from earlier attempts to get myself organized.
I simply made a ‘to the dump’ pile and a ‘keep’ pile and worked from there. Filing, sorting and cleaning took about a week and is still looked upon with a touch of distain from my highly organized girlfriend.
One of the tools I use on a daily basis is a program called Evernote. It’s free and available for most every computer operating system and mobile device.
I use Evernote to organize my ideas, things I’ve read online and keep a ‘To Do’ list current. All of this content syncs and when you leave for the day you have a nice neat pile of your ever growing digital life in your pocket.
Here is a screen shot of my Evernote running on my MacBook Pro, you can click on it for larger view.
If you guys have issue with your site on mine. I will take this down, but gees I'm just talking about digging your work.
The folks at Evernote make it easy to grab stuff from the web and add to your notebooks. For example, when I read an interesting topic online and I think that it would make a good story down the road I use the Evernote plugin for Safari, see below.
The little elephant icon (get it, Evernote remembers all your stuff for you. Elephants never forget.) Geeky awesomeness, right? Well, you click the icon and Evernote, which I keep running in the background, automatically grabs three important pieces of information. One, the URL. Two, the title of the post, story, etc. and finally a screen shot of the website.
As you can see, I get real creative with my notebook titles such as ‘Story Ideas’ or ‘Marketing Notes’ – super creative….
The screenshot above is a list of photographers that I’ve been digging on their work as of late.
Sure, technology will not solve all of your organizational problems but for the creative professional to have a simple and easy to use tool to keep their ideas in a safe and highly organized place is a good step.
I’m no Evernote expert by any means, but if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment or find me on Twitter at @Nathan_Armes or you can email me. All the cool kids use Twitter though…
Good luck!
Cheers,
Nathan W. Armes
Denver Photographer & Photojournalist
Be Social and Connect With Me:
Related Posts:
Connect With Me
Facebook comments: