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Evernote has been a service I’ve loved and used for years.  I spoke about it briefly in a previous week’s podcast and as promised, I am expanding upon that brief discussion here.  I wanted to try and convey to those of you who haven’t used Evernote before, just how powerful a tool it is.

The first question I get from people is, “what does Evernote do?”  I always say “it’s a great way to capture unstructured thoughts.” but that doesn’t do it justice at all.  I recently read another article about Evernote where the author did a good job of capturing the “what can I do with Evernote” question.  The simple answer is anything!  For example:

A priest uses Evernote to compose his weekly sermon while one man uses it to keep track of his weekly sins. A veteran suffering from traumatic brain injury uses it daily to literally remember everything and is showing other veterans with similar disabilities how to do the same. A musician uses Evernote to compose songs, tracking snippets of melodies with audio recordings and jotting down lyrics and sketches as they tap him on the shoulder. A hairdresser uses Evernote to catalog before and after shots of her clients. During the hair cut, she lets them browse through the portfolio of looks on her iPad. A tempura chef in Japan uses Evernote to store all his recipes and images of his best dishes. A wife uses it to store up all the things she wants to tell her husband before he comes home from work. A piano teacher uses audio notes to record her students, and then shares these recordings in shared notebooks with the students’ parents.

Students keep track of their notes, teachers plan lessons, shoppers create shopping lists, travelers create trip plans and photo journals and journalists write stories.

You can see that whatever it is you do, whatever your info-capturing-note-taking needs might be, Evernote can help you with the task at hand.  Of course, for me, the value of the Evernote service is not the ability to easily take notes.  There are lots of other repositories I could use if I just wanted to capture notes.  For me, the value is in the ubiquitous nature of that note-captured-information - whenever I want it, wherever I want it.

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