My Week With Evernote

This week in CEP 810, we explored tools to help us better organize our teaching selves. I really enjoyed watching David Allen’s TED talk. I read Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity a few years ago and it had a profound impact me. The notion of collecting and processing all of your obligations in order to keep your mind clear was very beneficial. I think that this technique is especially important for parents since it is easy to allow anxiety about your to-do list to keep you from ever actually being present with your children.

Evernote Logo by ZyMos, CC Attribution 2.0 Generic Lic

 

In order to better capture all of the little things that flutter past me every day, I started using Evernote this week. Many of my friends have suggested Evernote, but I have avoided using it, thinking that I already some app or system that does what Evernote does. I am glad I gave it a try. I certainly can manage my life from my phone or computer using Google Sheets, Docs, Calander, Bookmarks, tabs, random sheets of paper, etc. but Evernote puts it all in one place and makes it fully searchable. Is there an important line of text in an email? Want to upload something from your phone (like say the videos for your NLP project)? See a good recipe? Take a picture of it. Now you can search “habanero” and that awesome Jerk Ribs recipe will pop up.  Evernote has certainly made it much easier to quickly collect anything that I need in the moment. It definitely can help me get more done.

Image used: Evernote.svg (January 2010) by ZyMos used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Evernote.svg