I had read posts raving about Evernote for what seems like years, but I didn’t sign up until April of this year. I guess I thought I was organized enough without it. Now I can’t imagine life without Evernote.

Jamie Rubin’s Going Paperless posts were a big factor in my decision to sign up for Evernote. I loved the idea of having an organized, secure digital collection of all my important paperwork. With a few hours of scanning, I was able to toss drawers worth of paperwork I’d been too cautious to get rid of.

That pesky document on the terms of my student loan? Instead of rummaging through my desk, I can pull it up in two seconds with a quick Evernote search. The best part is that I can perform that search on my iMac, iPhone, iPad, or on any Internet browser.

Favourite Features

• There’s one feature about Evernote that really blew my mind. As it syncs your notes, it performs text recognition. Sounds pretty normal right? The text recognition feature works on images of text AND hand-written notes. The hand-written notes part really sold me. As much as I love digital organization, I’ll never quit carrying a small notebook around with me.
• I use Evernote’s Page Camera to capture my notes. Every meeting for the Piercing Time – Paris After Marville & Atget project, I sketch app lay-out ideas, and make note of what I need to do next. Saving them all to Evernote made them easily searchable and shareable with my colleagues.
• Evernote, in combination with mobile & web apps (such as Clearly, Everclip or Web Clipper) allows you to quickly save and organize content from the web. Clearly clips a distraction free version of any web page, and you can highlight it too. The web clipping feature is fantastic for organizing any kind of research. Recently, I’ve been job hunting. Everclip for iOS is great for saving job posts when I’m on the go.
• Every user gets a unique Evernote e-mail. You can e-mail articles, documents, etc, directly into specific notebooks. In the title of the e-mail you simply utilize # and @ . For example, if you wanted to forward an e-mail to your Filing Cabinet notebook, and tag it Paycheck, the e-mail title would look like this: Fwd: [……] @Filing Cabinet #Paycheck.
• It integrates well with other apps. I use Pocket to save articles from all over the web. In Pocket, you can easily send content Evernote. IFTTT is filled with recipes for Evernote.
• Searching within PDFs & other documents. This is a premium feature, and I think it’s well worth it. I save all important PDFs to Evernote – now they are accessible anywhere, and easily found with Evernote’s powerful search operators.

Evernote is fantastic for freelancers, basic users, business owners, designers and more.