Software I Use Daily: Evernote

Few tools have proven more useful in my day-to-day life than Evernote has. Evernote’s design is pretty simple; you can make notes that can include pictures, sound or documents as attachments, search through your notes, bundle them up into folders or tag them with tags. Notes get synchronized between any device that runs an Evernote client. Any image that gets included in a note also gets passed through OCR so that any words that appear in the image are indexed and searchable as well.

I probably refer to or write a note in Evernote at least half a dozen times per day. Every time I feel like I’m going to need to look up a piece of information more than once, it goes into Evernote. If I’m trying to figure something out, any information I find on that topic goes into Evernote.  As I refine my understanding about something, I’ll turn that raw info dump into something more compact and digestible. The ability to jump back to previous versions of notes is really helpful for this refining phase.

What I use Evernote for most is daily research logs. I really wish that I had started writing daily research logs years ago. They’ve been immensely helpful for organizing my thoughts and preventing me from doing redundant work. They also provide an easy-to-read archive of the work I’ve been doing, which makes preparing for status report meetings a lot easier.

I’ve been really pleased with Evernote overall, especially since they gave their mobile app a much-needed UI redesign. If you’re looking for a place to dump all the stuff that won’t fit in your brain, Evernote is definitely worth a look.

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