I have no doubt that if you read this blog, you are most likely the kind of professional who has at least heard of Evernote. This Cloud app is widely popular due to its ability to help you create a paperless office. You can scan receipts and documents directly to Evernote with scanners like Fujitsu’s ScanSnap. If you already have scanned documents as PDFs or jpegs, just attach them to a note. One of the things I love about Evernote is that it gives you unlimited storage space (although depending on your plan, you may have a limited amount of data you can upload in any one month). There’s a desktop version, so if you don’t have an internet connection, you can still work on any notes you’ve created. And naturally there’s an iPhone version as well. I could go on. But here are seven ways in which I use it specifically as a creative professional.
Film and story ideas. Whenever I have an idea for a film, or an idea to implement in a film project I’m already working on, I create a note and put it in the appropriate Notebook (Notebooks are the places where you store Evernote notes).
Research. I love using the web clipping feature for saving web pages that I want to go back and read. This is great if you’re doing research on a documentary project for instance. And if you clip the whole page (as opposed to just the link), you can still read it even if you’re not connected to the internet. Evernote has web clipping plugins for all the major browsers.
Call logs with Clients. Any time I’m on the phone with a client or prospect for any length of time, I create an Evernote to take notes. It’s also a good practice to do this whenever you talk to places like your bank, credit card company, or any other business where you might want to go back and reference what they said.
Checklists. I keep my equipment checklist in Evernote, as well as any other important checklists.
Photos for Inspiration. My wife Tasra is the photographer in the family. She uses Evernote to upload and save any photos that inspire her. You can save them all to a Notebook and you have one place where you can easily access visual inspiration whenever you need it. Inspiring Quotes. I am moved by quotes that inspire me. Whenever I hear or read something that really clicks with me, I save it to my “Inspiration” notebook.
Blog Ideas. In order to maintain the current blogging schedule I’ve been doing, I need to keep track of all my blog topic ideas, no matter how insignificant they may seem. I save them in my Blogging notebook and check off topics as I write them. Some topics never get written. But if I’m ever at a loss for ideas, I just come back to the list.