Use Evernote to organise information and collaborate
Evernote is a useful tool for organising information and collaborating with others on creative projects. But, like Trello, it can feel a little overwhelming at first. So how can entrepreneurs use this popular tool to organise ideas for their business or creative projects?
Although I’ve used Evernote for years for writing projects, I recently learned a few new tips and tricks from Bethany Stephens. She’s the founder of Soapbox Influence, a marketing agency based in Bentonville, Arkansas. Her company employs 15 people and works with Fortune 500 brands, including NBC Universal. Stephens and her team use Evernote for tasks like onboarding new hires, capturing meeting notes and iterating blog posts. In a recent interview, she walked me through her exact process.
Capture Everything
A notebook, digital or otherwise, is only as useful as the notes inside of it. I save as much as I can inside of Evernote including invoices, article ideas and book quotes. I also take pictures with the mobile app and clip interesting articles for the web. Although I’ve used Evernote on and off since 2013, my library of notes pales in comparison to Stephens’. Her library contains over 24,000 notes.
“I capture every fleeting thought and idea in Evernote,” she says. “I’ve joked about the people who use the ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ bracelets. I've always trained myself to think, ‘Can this go in Evernote?’ I very much subscribe to the idea of it as an external brain.”
If you get into a habit of capturing information regularly, you’ll quickly build a library with hundreds, if not thousands, of notes, which is why organising them is so important.
Use Notebooks Sparingly and Tags Heavily
Evernote users can arrange their notes tags and file them into individual notebooks. A note can exist only in a single notebook at any one time, but it can have many tags. Keeping lots of notebooks forces users to figure out where their notes should live every time. It's faster to keep a few key notebooks and rely more on tags.
For example, my primary notebooks are Inbox and Archive. I save new notes into my Inbox. After reviewing them, I file these notes into the Archive notebook. I can also save these notebooks to a desktop or local computer for offline access. I usually add five or six tags to individual notes including “creativity” and “productivity,” as well as “work” and “career.” Another is “money.” Stephens follows a similar approach.
“Five or six years ago, I had to retrain myself because I was getting really sloppy. It was the equivalent of a file cabinet, and I was just cramming everything into it with no rhyme or reason,” she says. “Now, I really err on the side of very few notebooks, rather than trying to have a notebook for everything, then, being giddy with my tags because there's so many ways to cross tag.”
Review Your Notes
The real value from any notebook lies in reviewing what's inside and seeing how different ideas relate to each other. Evernote will suggest how notes relate to each other, but you really need to dive into your notebook and see what's inside.
Set aside thirty minutes each week to review recently captured notes. This review process enables you to see interesting connections between different notes and find ideas you'd forgotten. Stephens completed this type of review a few days before our interview.
“I found some notes from May 2019 that were really useful to our business. We had an individual who was in a leadership role within our company at that time, who is no longer with us, and we have a new individual in that role,” she says.
“The notes that I found, just in doing a cursory review, were still very relevant, so I shared them with that individual, and he said, ‘Gosh, this is the best roadmap for my job, and I wouldn't have known to ask these questions.’”
If All Else Fails, Search
Evernote supports optical character recognition and saved searches. With a little digging, you can find old notes, even if they weren't tagged or filed correctly.
“Evernote has such speedy search, it's been the reason that I’ve probably stuck with the platform across a decade, because I never have any trouble finding anything,” says Stephens. “Good tagging and good keyword use, and the more you use it, I think the more you self-train toward that.”
I’ve found the act of clipping or saving notes and annotating them with my reactions encourages me to remember ideas. Stephens had a similar experience.
“I’ve developed a bit of a strange ability to retain keywords. So if you think about searching, you’re looking for the most unique word, right? So I’ll typically throw in the word that I think will lead me to that note,” she says.
Collaborate
I sometimes write an outline inside of a tool like Evernote and write later on using a dedicated writing app. Stephens also drafts outlines for blog posts and articles. She shares these notes with content creators to iterate on. Stephens also relies on checklists inside of Evernote to onboard new team members.
“I’m a big believer in self-onboarding. I think probably because I’m a lover of words, and of writing, I don’t want to train someone. I want them to train themselves, essentially,” she says.
“They will walk themselves through our onboarding process, which has a litany of articles to read. It gives them case studies and various steps to go through. So for about two weeks when someone joins Soapbox Influence, they’re spending time in Evernote.”
Stephens also uses Evernote to share her bio and information about her company’s story and branding with parties and interviewers like me.
Evernote is a powerful tool that can help executives, entrepreneurs and creative people capture and arrange their ideas. All you have to do is use it.
