Steve Dotto here.
Today, we’re going to talk about using Evernote in a mobile environment, using Evernote on
the road.
Now I have become such a fan of Evernote.
It’s really the core application for my entire productivity system.
It’s at the heart of everything.
I use it on my notebook.
I use it on my desktop.
I use it on my phone.
I use it on tablet.
Evernote, for me, has become kind of my digital brain.
Now anybody who uses Evernote understands that the key to really getting the most out
of Evernote is properly tagging information as you capture it and you put it into Evernote
so that you can find it again later.
It does no good having a big shoebox full of all of the different information that we
need to get, a digital shoebox full of information that we need if we can’t find the information
when we need it.
So tagging the information and being able to search on it, that is a real key to Evernote.
As we start to use it in a mobile environment, for example I’ve got it here running on
my iPhone, as we start to use it more in the mobile environment, again that business of
actually tagging the information and creating a searchable criteria for it as you put it
in, as you save it to Evernote, becomes essential in making it work as a productivity solution.
Let me show you a couple of ways that we can do that and a few other tips around using
Evernote on things like your phone.
Fortunately, it works on all of the major mobile operating systems.
We can see that it’s got a little less functionality because there’s a little less screen space
as it does on the desktop application but it really does everything you need right within
this.
They’ve done a nice job of basically giving us all of these different tabs that allow
us to organize the information within Evernote.
So there are all of my different notes.
I can scroll through all my notes.
I can look at my notebooks and of course this is synced through the web to all of my other
devices so all of my information is available to me when I need it.
This is one of the things that I really like in Evernote.
It’s this Places tag.
As we capture information, if we’ve enable geolocation within Evernote, it will take
and put in GPS information, location-based information, on where this note was created.
That’s tremendous for things like photographs but it works for all these different sorts
of notes.
Here’s my travel over the last little while.
If I was saying I made a note of that when I was in Winnipeg, I just can’t remember
what it was, I can go and take a look, just tap on Winnipeg, and there are the different
notes that I've captured or created when I was in Winnipeg.
That’s how our brain works.
Sometimes you don’t remember what was in the note or a keyword within the note but
you can remember, oh, I did that when I was in the airport in Calgary or I did that in
the airport in San Francisco or while I was having dinner with my family in Toronto.
This gives me the ability to look based on location.
It even gets far more detailed in the city.
It’ll get right down into the street address and that sort of stuff.
So for me when I’m in my home, Vancouver, I’ve got way more notes.
There I can zoom in and I can actually see much more detailed information of where individual
notes were captured right within the city itself.
There are a lot around my home environment of course and depending on where I happened
to be.
So the Places tagging within Evernote is really powerful.
The next thing I wanted to show you is it’s not always convenient to write a note as you’re
traveling about.
Of course, we use a camera a lot to capture notes when we’re traveling on our mobile
devices but we can also use this dictation service.
We just tap on the Dictation tool there and that allows us to then dictate a note.
It’s great.
“Take a note, Steve.
Remember that it’s really important that you do this, that, or the other thing and
save this note and then act upon it when you get home.”
Once you’re done, you save it and it saves it as an audio note than you can then go listen
to.
You’ve just done a note without having to type a whole bunch of things in, another great
way of using Evernote to help keep you organized.
The third thing that I wanted to show you right now is the ability to capture documents
while you’re out and about with your phone.
The great thing with Evernote you can enable the Camera app which will allow you to take
pictures.
That’s great for taking pictures of things and making a note.
But do you see that little icon right next to the camera?
That’s a Document icon.
If we tap on that—and of course it’s not going to look very good because I’m sitting
here on the computer—that allows us to go into a document format for taking pictures
and being able to take images of printed notes.
I use this one all the time.
When I’m in a meeting.
I’ll take notes on paper and instead of saving those pages and maybe scanning them
when I get back to the office or doing anything like that, as soon as I finish the meeting,
I take those pages and I snap pictures using the Document camera within Evernote so that
I can then have them always available to me.
So it doesn’t matter what scrap of paper I’m writing note down on, I’ve got the
notes and they’re available to me in Evernote at any time.
Now that is a tremendous way of keeping track of all the little notes that you take.
There is one other area that this works really well as well.
That is taking pictures of the whiteboard or maybe the blackboard in a classroom-type
environment.
It is taking a photo of the board when you finish brainstorming or you’re finished
working with all of your assignments on it.
That’s a great way to document it and then keep that up to date as well.
So you don’t necessarily have to write down everything that’s somebody writing down
the board.
You can pay attention to what’s being talked about and then know that you’ll be able
to capture all that information with a quick snap when you’re done.
Evernote is such a powerful tool and it integrates so nicely in our lives in so many ways.
If you use it yourself, you’re going to find these and many other ways that Evernote
will work for you.
I hope you found this video useful.
If you have, please give us a prop.
Say you like us.
We always like to see that people are validating our work on YouTube.
I’m Steve Dotto.
You take care.
[END OF VIDEO] Steve Dotto0Evernote on the Road0March 26,
2013
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