I <3 Evernote

There are a lot of things I life I frequently tell others about.  Our CSA, my recent cooking adventures, how funny my students are, my church, etc.  When I find good things, I like to share them.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been borderline obsessed with Evernote, which has only gotten better since I first started using it.  It recently occurred to me, however, that I never really did a good job of explaining what Evernote is or why I love it so much.  So, without further ado…

• There are a million different ways to utilize Evernote, but I use it primarily to organize and save recipes I find online.  You can save anything: pictures, documents, articles clipped from the web, photos from your phone, emails, videos
• I can access my data from anywhere: my computer, my phone, my iPod Touch.
• The search functionality is incredibly useful.  Search any word, even in a picture, and it pulls up all your notes.
• When you cut and paste information from the web (my primary method of adding notes to Evernote), the program automatically clips the web address for you as well, making it easy to revisit the original source if you need to
• Lots of storage space–the free version of Evernote allows you to save 2 GB of notes every month.  I’ve never needed more than that (and I use it a lot), but if I did it would only cost $5 a month.
• I honestly don’t know how people keep track of recipes they want to make without something like Evernote.  I’m constantly saving recipes to it and cook recipes I’ve saved several times a week.  It’s one of my top 3 computer programs, next to Firefox and Windows Live Writer.

Tips:

• Install the desktop application–it’s much easier to use and “sexier” than the web application.
• Evernote is not just for recipes!  People use it to write research papers, organize their finances, plan weddings and all kinds of other things.  It just occurred to me that it’d probably be awesome for handling lesson plan documents.
• Use tags, especially for recipes, or searching “beans” will yield more results than you may want.  (See the above comment on search functionality)
• Despite all my love, I know I don’t use Evernote to its full potential.  You can share folders and earlier this year they unveiled the “Trunk”, a collection of mobile and web apps that work with Evernote and make it “more awesome”.

So, I mentioned I’m obsessed.  How obsessed?  Here’s my account, by the numbers, as of this afternoon:

total notes: 1960–which is an average of 108 new notes a month.  If you need a recipe for something, I probably have one
number of notes that aren’t recipes: 15
largest folders: desserts (392 notes), vegetarian main dish (391), sides (182), soup (134)
most used tags: vegetarian (568), baking (130), pasta (116), chocolate (56), chicken (53)
other tags: Asian (46), candy (12), dip (31), how to (27), pizza (26)

The folks at Evernote don’t even know I exist. I wrote this post because I love the product and it makes my life much easier.  I have received no compensation for this post and all opinions are my own.