Bridging the Nerd Gap

(If you’re brand new to Evernote, you might want to see this, too.)

You’ve heard all the hype.

Your friends and colleagues—even Internet wonks like myself—will not shut up about what a fantastic service Evernote is and that you should totally be using it, Ed.

So, you heed the advice; you install Evernote on your phone, your computer and maybe even your tablet.

You make yourself a user account, login and then you sit in front of it for a few minutes and wonder, “so, what the hell do I do with this thing?”

You’re not alone. Lots of people install Evernote then stare at it for an hour wondering for what purpose, pray tell, should they actually use it.

It’s not unlike deciding that you’d like to write something (but you’re not sure what), sitting down at your computer and opening up your favorite writing application… and just staring at a blank screen.

Being the guy who wrote the book on Evernote, I’ve got a few ideas for how you can get started because, and I mean this sincerely, Evernote is fantastic solution for oodles of problems.

Think about the mission

No, not the De Niro flick from forever ago; I’m talking about the problem Evernote purports to solve.

“Remember Everything” is how the app is pitched; it’s apropos, I think.

So, with that in mind, think about the kinds of things you want to remember, but currently don’t. These can be things as benign as how much money you spent at the Apple store last month or things as meaningful as when your oldest kid lost his first tooth.

Look at common use cases

Here are a handful of applications that have become some of the canonical Evernote use cases:

• Recipes: Create a new notebook called “Recipes” and go clip a few of your favorites from the web. Note: this is helpful if you actually cook anything, which I really don’t.
• Bank Statements: Chances are, you have a stack of these (or some other kind of historical financial thingies) lying around that you’re keeping just in case you need them for some reason. Get yourself a document scanner (this is the one I use), scan them to PDFs and drop them into Evernote. Then kiss that unsightly stack of paper goodbye. Use it for kindling at your next cookout or something.
• Stuff You Read and Liked: Clipping stuff from the web into Evernote is pretty damn simple no matter which browser you use. If you come across an article or blog post on the web that makes you all happy and whatnot, fire that thing into Evernote so you can read it again five years from now. Oh, and not to get all FUD on you, but web pages have a nasty habit of changing or outright disappearing as the years go by — this helps ensure that you’ll always have the original.
• Project Notes/Resources: If, say, you’re in the process of building a new deck in your backyard or planning to launch a new website in the near future, slap all of your ideas, inspirations and other details into a notebook in Evernote. I’ve done this bunches of times and it’s still one of my favorite ways to use Evernote.
• Meeting Notes: I take all of my meeting notes in Evernote (naturally). If you bring a laptop or tablet with you to meetings, take your notes in Evernote so a) you’ll never lose them and b) you can send them to Eric from Logistics whose dumb ass totally slept through the entire meeting. Review the notes later, making sure to handle any tasks that were assigned to you or important dates you need to put on the calendar.

I could go on, but these are just the basics. Other than the recipe thing, each of the above examples represents one way in which I use Evernote.

Share with others

My wife and I have a handful of shared notebooks that we can both access, but the one we use like crazy is the one with the shopping lists in it. Since she’s the one who cooks in our house (which is great becauss I suck at cooking and she’s really good at it), I get to do a good deal of the shopping. Instead of having to dictate a shopping list to me as we both meander around the kitchen, she just asks me to go to the grocery store and says “it’s in Evernote” as I walk out. If that sounds really awesome and convenient, that’s because it is.

I do a weekly podcast with a friend of mine and all of our plans, topics and such live in an Evernote notebook that we share. We brainstorm topics throughout the week and just stick them in the notebook whenever inspiration strikes. Then, when it comes time to record, we skim what we’ve added and see what we feel like talking about. The coolest part is we can both add stuff from any device we use (iPhones, mostly) instead of having to be sitting at our computers. Oh, and the notebook also has all of our logo files and such, in case we ever need them.

In Conclusion

The great thing about Evernote is that once you find a really cool way to use it that really helps you, you’ll almost immediately start finding other ways to use it. Before you know it, you’ll be like me (except with better hair, I hope). If you want to really get cracking with Evernote, pick up a copy of Evernote Essentials today; it’s like a warm chocolate chip cookie that you read instead of eat.

Don’t.

If you already do, move someplace else.

Why?

Welp, if you ask me, one of three things will happen:

1. Twitter will wait a few months and then shut Posterous down permanently. I feel this is *far* and way the more likely scenario.

2. Twitter will subsume Posterous’s talent and effectively ignore Posterous the service (while letting it run to avoid user backlash). It will turn into this year’s Friendfeed: a great service, acquired then abandoned. It might stay up for awhile, possibly years, but there’s (effectively) nobody watching it.

3. Twitter will devote both resources and people to the Posterous service and apps and it will blossom into the delightful young starlet we all hoped it would be. I’ll be shocked if this happens, but it’s technically possible.

With all of the other options out there, I think staying with Posterous for longer than the next month would be the wrong decision.

Learn from history, folks, because it’s about to repeat itself here.

A big part of Evernote’s marketing is centered around the idea of memory. Phrases like “your external brain” and “remember everything” make this clear. Why, then does so much of the Internet chatter around Evernote focus on things like paperless living and workplace productivity? Of course Evernote is fine for those things—I personally employ it for many such tasks—but I think a great big chunk of Evernote’s exploding user base is missing out on a really killer feature of the product.

Of course, I’m talking about storing actual, emotion-based memories in Evernote. And not just the great plate of fish you had at your last birthday or that photo of your special lady looking especially toothsome (check and check, by the way), but the more momentous events that take place in people’s lives which, given the advent of little pocket computers, are painfully simple to capture.

Today, I’m going to open the kimono a little bit and tell you guys a few of my most valued Evernote notes that are based on some of the most memorable and important events in my life.

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I’ve talked before about how I use Evernote to build my own history book; a detailed account of my life that goes beyond a bunch of bank records, Jiffy Lube receipts and beer labels. I’m not just blowing smoke when I say that many of the most important moments in my life are safely housed in my trusty Evernote account, where one day I’ll be able to hand the whole mess over to the next generation of our family.

Call me stupid or whatever, but it brings me peace to know that so much of what’s important to me isn’t just shoved in some file box somewhere in a hall closet. Having all of it at my fingertips and taking casual strolls down memory lane is one of my favorite parts of using Evernote.

Click here if you want to learn to use Evernote.

I like lists. Hell, I love lists. Between my obvious love affair with Evernote and the degree to which I trust OmniFocus, it’s quite apparent that productivity software is something I care about and which routinely captures my fancy.

So. Clear.

What do I think about Clear?

While in San Francisco last month for Macworld, I got a chance to briefly demo Clear (courtesy of the handsome Nik Fletcher of Realmac software). I have to say, my initial impressions were quite good. The app is clearly well thought-out and make exceptional use of iOS’s gesture-based interaction paradigm and, frankly, it’s gorgeously simple.

“But”, I thought to myself, “this isn’t going to supplant OmniFocus.” After all, the two apps are worlds apart and Clear, for everything it is, isn’t a GTD-style list-maker. It wasn’t meant to be one.

There are days when I just need a list; errands to run, chores to finish around the house, things to buy at the hardware store. I could drop these things into OmniFocus, sure, but the data is inherently transient and doesn’t really need a place in my Fortress of Productivity. This is typically where my trusty Pilot G2 Mini and Field Notes notebook would come into play. For one-off lists, analog tools are my go-to.

Clear is going to get a shot at that particular title.

The ease with which I can quickly compose a list of things is on par with any other app out there. It’s certainly faster than OmniFocus.

And I think that, because Clear deals exclusively in short, text-only chunks of information, the Realmac folks were able to optimize the living pudding out of the interface such that the user, once properly acclimated, could fly through it. There’s no background sync operation to wait for, no extraneous options to distract the user from the one thing Clear does. That’s the secret sauce here, if you ask me: pure speed.

My iPhone is just as ubiquitous as my pen and notebooks and—believe me—unless I’m sleeping, all three of these tools are in my pocket, almost without exception. Temporarily retiring the Field Notes notebook in favor of evaluating Clear isn’t going to be a huge leap for me. I can’t really give an opinion as to how I think it will pan out, but the Realmac guys make such great stuff that I can’t help but give it a go, nor can I help being optimistic.

So, that’s the deal—for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be putting Clear through it’s paces as my “incidental” list manager. If nothing else, it will be a marked improvement over my abysmal handwriting.

I’ll let you guys know how it goes.