Not only am I ADD, I am forgetful and somewhat disorganized. This often leads to a scenario where I can’t find the receipt for our church accountant, can’t remember who it was that wrote “I can help with the silent auction” next to their name on the sign-up sheet, or how the great illustration about a gorilla I saw online went. Evernote fixes all that for me (assuming I remember to use it).
Evernote starts as a clipping service. When installed on your machine (or when logged on to the web app), you can highlight a portion of a page and save it to evernote. You can then search your clippings for the bit you remember (say “gorilla” for example), and find that choice tidbit you found earlier online.
But that only solves one of my problems. The real genius comes in as you take a photo through a webcam, camera phone, or other device. You can sync through your computer, upload from your phone or e-mail it as an attachment to your Evernote address. Evernote then runs a character recognition on the image and stores that information on their servers (and syncs with any computers that are running the desktop app) ready to be searched by you at a later date. In my experience, the character recognition does an excellent job with slightly fuzzy images and even handwriting.
Here’s what I do. I capture receipts with a camera, upload them to evernote, and when it comes time to reconcile my church card statement, I have a way to search and find the missing receipts. I can even print a copy to put the mind of our church accountant at ease. I also take pictures of important whiteboard brainstorming sessions to look back on later and business cards I need to remember. There is a desktop client (mac and windows), iphone app, windows mobile app, and web app if you don’t have any of those available.
It also has a sharing feature, capture from clipboard, and several ways of categorizing and searching that are all interesting and useful, but the best part is that Evernote is free! The basic (free) plan gives you 40MB a month in uploads. If you need more than that it’s only $5 a month or $45 a year for a 500MB monthly allowance.
The one downside I could find with the program is that the text that has been interpreted from the character recognition is not selectable. In other words, you cant copy and paste it into your excel reconciliation form. Overall, it is a slick and geeky way to store that which my brain seems to loose, forget, or misplace, and makes me look far more organized than I am which is a truly amazng feat!
