Hello everyone and welcome back to the keep productive YouTube channel today, I am joined by Stacey Harmon
It's good to be back with you Stacey. It's great to be back talking about my favorite app. Definitely and
It's obviously
not a hidden part of the conversation, but we're
obviously, I've talked a lot about Evan in the past and I guess I'm doing some I'm filling some wrongs or
What's the saying like I'm sort of?
Covering my base or something like that. I can remember saying but basically I've missed I'm trying to do good now. I'm trying to
cover all the tools in the right manner, so
You you get the first spot of talking about Evernote, which is quite exciting. I think well, thank you
I'm honored and I love that you're
open to it'd be a
Great tool for a group of people
definitely and
we we've also been talking and
Stacey has kindly put together ten Evernote recommendations for you guys so that you guys can go away and apply them to your own
Evernote accounts or whether you're interested
So take it away Stacey sure, so
Let's see
I'm going to go through
Lists of things that I really think you should know about Evernote to make it work
The best it possibly can for you
So the first is if you're going to get the most out of ever note you want to use the full desktop app to organize
your data
and you want to use mobile to capture and find you're really going to be
Frustrated if you're trying to organize Evernote from your mobile device or from the web
you want to use the power of the full free desktop app, which they have for both Mac and
Evernote client sorry Mac and Windows clients
You just go to Evernote comm forward slash download and you'll have access to all the power of the tool
So the second hack is that you should understand that every single Evernote account comes with a default notebook
It's where you create notes if they if you don't override that at the time of note creation
So notes have to live in a notebook and that's your default notebook
and if you have a new Evernote account, typically Evernote calls that inbox, but if you have an older account
It might be named your user account or something. Like first notebook, depending on how old your notebook is, so
Understanding that you have this default notebook and that's where notes are going to be created
unless you
Tell it to create the note somewhere else is a really helpful concept to understand which leads to the next tip
Which is really rooted in David Allen's ideas around GTD
Which is you want to centralize as much stuff as you can in
That default notebook and I call it my inbox. I actually rename it to dot inbox that's a naming convention hack
To have it clear that it's a collection point
And I use that as a processing station not a holding tank
So people get in trouble with Evernote it gets out of control when they just start collecting endlessly information in their inbox
And they don't process it
so having a mentality that you want to process that information can really help your overall Evernote usage and
Even if you need to move that data into a notebook that's like holding tank or to process or to file
That can really help your usage of Evernote
so the next tip that I would suggest is that you
Organize with notebooks not tags. Now. I know this can be controversial and everybody has an opinion about it
But my theory is that you should start at the base by organizing with notebooks and stacks
Particularly if you're going to be sharing data or want to share data with other users
In the current form of Evernote now, we do have some insight that this may be changing
So my recommendation may evolve over time but in the current way Evernote works
tags don't render or function the same way across all devices and
because we use Evernote from multiple devices you want to have
Consistency across those devices and the way you're going to have that is with notebooks
And stacks and then in addition if do want to really maximize the powerful sharing features of Evernote
You can share a notebook, but you can't share a group of notes based on the tag
So you open up a lot more options for yourself when you organize with notebooks now, I'm not anti tags
You can certainly use tags very effectively too as a search feature, which is how I advise you use them
but I think they're a layer on top of the notebooks and stacks organization and
the next tip is I
Actually work to prepare my notes for what I call search success
so what I'm saying here is I advise using naming conventions to really
prepare your notes to have a successful search one of the reasons I advise that you don't have to use tags in Evernote is because
Evernote search is so powerful that in essence. The entire note is a tag
So if the keyword that you're looking for appears anywhere in your note if you look
For if you go through search your note is going to be found. So
Instead of taking the time to tag the note. Why not? Just make sure you name the note in a way that will facilitate
Rapid search in the future which leads to my next tip, which is
If you spruce up your search skills
you're really going to
Have a great experience with Evernote and there's a lot of advanced search
Parameters that make Evernote really really powerful and one of those is an in title search
So if you do a search and you proceed your search with the words in title colon
No spaces all lowercase and then you put in your word or phrase after that
it will restrict the search just to the title of the note and
if you've prepped your notes for search success by
Titling your note purposely
That can be a really useful tip. It's one
I rely on a lot in my account and one of the ways that I maintain the ability to find whatever I'm looking for
within an account that has over 30,000 notes in it and
the next hack that I have is getting familiar with note links when I
discovered note links like my understanding of what I could
Even accomplish with Evernote was like my mind was blown. It was like wow, I just had this entire
New option of organization open up to me and what a note link will do is allow you
To hyperlink between any two notes in your system
and it's a really powerful tool that you can use to create structure and ease of navigation between
different parts of your system and
One of the reasons that I advocate working on your desktop your full desktop app
Which I talked about earlier in my tips is because you can use key commands to create these note links and quickly
paste them in notes and create this organization between
like-minded data
Between projects for example or tasks both things which I do within Evernote
the next tip is
Create notes from outside of Evernote. So it's certainly easy to create notes inside of Evernote
But Evernote has three really powerful ways to create notes from outside of Evernote
I call it kind of like the the big three you have the Evernote Web Clipper
which
Allows you to capture and create a note from any web-based data that you find
And save that directly into Evernote without ever opening
Evernote it also retains the originating hyperlink back to the source and
Evernote has some hidden features
That interact with particular sites on the web clipper
If you try web clipping say on Amazon or YouTube you're gonna find that there's some nifty
formatting that Evernote has because of official integrations with those kinds of
Locations and
That data is all kept really neat and pretty inside of Evernote
That's one. The other is on premium accounts. You can create Evernote notes by forwarding emails into Evernote
it's one of the key ways that I keep inbox zero on my
email account and that's by forwarding actionable items and reference materials that live in emails into Evernote and
Marrying them to other project materials that are not email related
So really powerful way to go and then the third is from your mobile device
using if you're on iOS
Evernote's scannable app this is a
separate app from Evernote that Evernote owns and develops and it
Integrates beautifully as you'd expect with Evernote
I use it to digitize all of my receipts and pretty much any paper that comes into my life
from
When I'm not at my desk, so and that happens a lot. I'm getting receipts. I'm self-employed. I want to track my
expenses and make sure that I'm
Retaining and centralizing all of that in one spot scannable is a huge help for that
And for those of you that aren't on iOS the Evernote camera
Within the Evernote app is a brilliant tool to digitize as well
They both work really really great
And then let's see. I have also key commands
So I think power users are really putting the power of key commands to use within Evernote
They for a couple that I use all the time are jump to notebook
I'm on a Mac. So they do vary between the Mac and the windows platforms, but I'm
navigating around different notebooks using the jump command and then I'm also
Moving weather sing like one at a time or in Mass notes from my inbox to other
locations in my system, so I'm processing and filing without ever taking my hands off the keyboard and that's a really
Efficient way to use and get the most out of ever note
Wow there were plenty there to go away and implement in your account and and
3,000 note plus that's a definitely stumps mine. I
Think I only have 10,000 but that's really really good
and an appoint they're actually
The note links. I don't actually use that technique
So that's something I'm gonna go away with because I remember Enrico Nala who did quite a lot of sort of features about everyday
he he uses those and and
Swears by them. So I will definitely take a look at them. You use use Evernote a lot as a reference
Library bait, is that right? Yeah. Yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah
So one of the great ways you could do that would be to just create a table of contents note
In one of your reference notebooks
Too which basically is note links, right?
And you and I use this isn't maybe an eleventh bonus feature
I use the reminder the non dated reminder to kind of pin that note to the top of my no logo
So that I have easy access to it particularly from my mobile device. I use that technique a lot
Yeah, I like that. I do the pinning thing really well, but the table of contents I definitely need to do because
That would be useful for some of my business
Might sort of new business documents I store in there so that that's a yeah, really good takeaway. So, thank you and
That was a great list. They see
Where can everyone find you after this episode?
you can go to Harman enterprises com for all the
free videos blog posts and paid products that I offer around ever new
fantastic, and if you want to learn more about
Stacey's workflow and setup. You can also tune into the tools they use podcast
and if it's available, I'll include it in link in description, but it should be out on the
23rd of
September at about 5:00 p.m. B st
So, thanks Stacy
And it's been really lovely talking to you. I enjoyed it as always thanks for having me