Published in · 7 min read · Jan 27, 2020
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Evernote is arguably the most popular note-taking app that has withstood so many changes and improvements over the last several years.
There are countless ways you can use Evernote for organizing both personal and professional areas of your life. In fact, it’s what many consider to be their digital brain. The ability to save and share notes across devices and with other users makes for a seamless note-taking experience when managing projects, setting goals and organizing just about anything.
As with every great app, you need to explore its wide variety of features a bit further to use it to its full advantage. In this article, we’re going to cover the best ways you can use Evernote to take notes more efficiently and boost your productivity.
Use tags to organize your notes
Organizing notes in Evernote seems straightforward: each note goes inside a notebook. But what happens if a note has attributes that make it relevant to other notebooks? The problem here is that a note can only be saved in one notebook at a time. And as your repository of notes grows, it can be time-consuming to sift through everything just to find what you’re looking for.
A growing number of users are starting to use tags instead of notebooks to organize their notes on a deeper level. With tags, you can create hierarchies and organize notes according to a tagging system that works for you.
Unlike notebooks, the amount of tags you can create is practically unlimited. Although it’s a common practice to add several tags to each note, remember to keep it at a minimum to avoid creating unnecessary clutter.
It’s worth noting that every word in each note is indexed by Evernote so if the word “motivation” already appears in the note, there’s no need for you to tag the note with the same word.
Add reminders to your notes
One great way to make the most of Evernote is by adding reminders to your time-sensitive notes. If you’re constantly swamped with work and appointments, important tasks can easily fall through the cracks.
To set a reminder, click the alarm clock icon on a note and add a due date if you need to. Notes with reminders are grouped together and appear as a to-do list on top of your list of notes making it easier to sort them or mark them as done.
What’s great about this feature is you can opt to receive notifications about important to-dos across different devices. You also have the option to receive an email when the reminder is due. Take it up a notch by connecting your
Use Web Clipper to save everything — even emails
Whether you’re looking for inspiration for a new blog post or ideas for a new product for your business, gone are the days when bookmarking was the best way of saving pieces of content you come across online. The amount of information we consume on a daily basis has made it more challenging to store and sort everything efficiently in one place.
Luckily, Evernote has a Web Clipper Extension that lets you save web pages, articles, documents, screenshots, and more. Add tags to your clipped content and save it in the notebook of your choice so you can easily search for it later. You can even annotate screenshots to remember why you saved it and share what you clipped with friends.
One useful feature that comes with the web clipper is your option to clip emails coming from Gmail or Outlook. This is particularly handy if you have several emails you want to easily access later in your Evernote account. You can take it up a notch and integrate Google Calendar with Evernote if it helps to have your reminders in your calendar.
Merge related notes into one
If you’re creating multiple notes on a given project, you might realize it makes more sense to have them all in one note. On the desktop app, simply select the notes you want to merge while holding down Ctrl or Cmd and click “Merge” in the window that pops up.
The selected notes will be merged into a single note and the individual notes will be moved to “Trash” which can be restored later if you change your mind. The new note will be renamed based on the title of the first note you selected. The merged notes are arranged according to the order in which you selected the original notes.
Save photos as notes
What makes Evernote such a powerful note-taking app is not only the ease with which you can write and save notes. It also lets you save and share other types of media such as photos and videos. With the Evernote app, you can easily take a photo, save it as a note, photo, or document and add any important details for you to remember.
Evernote also lets you auto-save photos that have handwriting or text by scanning your gallery and letting you choose which ones to save. The photos are processed in a way that makes them searchable so you can easily find what you need even when you’re working with several photos and documents. This feature can come in handy when you stumble upon furniture inspiration for your home redecorating or need to take snapshots of your receipts when managing your finances.
Use Evernote templates
Using Evernote templates can help you work more efficiently when you’re dealing with notes that work better in a certain format. It takes the load off of note-taking so you can focus on jotting down content without worrying about how to lay it all out.
With dozens of pre-made templates to choose from, deciding which works best for your needs can be a daunting task. So, we’ve listed a few of the most useful and interesting templates in Evernote to help you get started on improving your productivity:
- Individual Project — Organize all details for a specific project
- Goal Tracking — Record your monthly progress for each of your goals
- Meeting Notes — Organize your notes from meetings
- Save Money — Track your expenses to reach your financial goals
- Daily Planner — Stay on top of your daily activities
- Get Fit — Track your diet and exercise to achieve your fitness goals
Learn the search syntax
Searching through your notes can take a lot of time if you only remember vague ideas of what you’re looking for and not the exact words you used. In this case, it helps to get to know Evernote’s search syntax so you can easily narrow down your search results to the most relevant notes.
On Evernote, you can search for note and notebooks by keywords, tags, notebooks, date created, media type, and so much more. Here’s a list of some of the most commonly used search operators that will save you a lot of time:
- any: — searches for notes that match any of the terms entered in the search (e.g. any: wedding style returns all notes containing either “wedding” or “style”)
- tag: — searches for notes containing the specified tags (e.g. tag:personal returns notes with the tag “personal”)
- notebook: — searches for notes within the specified notebook (e.g. notebook:Fitness searches for notes only stored in the Fitness notebook)
- resource: — searches for notes with a certain type of media such as image, audio, PDF (e.g. resource:image/jpeg returns notes containing a JPEG image)
- updated: — searches for notes updated during a certain period of time (e.g. updated:day-7 returns notes updated within the last 7 days)
With the advanced search syntax, you can easily make highly targeted and customized searches. You can even save search properties if you find yourself using the same ones repeatedly. Click Save Search, name your search, and you’re good to go.
Explore Evernote add-ons
Now that you have some ideas on how you can be more productive with Evernote, you can start exploring beyond the app and try out different integrations that will help you simplify your workflow and make your life a whole lot easier.
Use Evernote for Gmail to save important emails directly into your notes and share them with others — all from your inbox. The Google Drive integration allows you to add your files into your notes for quicker access. If you like to work using the Pomodoro Technique, you can sync PomoDone with Evernote to track your time spent on tasks related to your notes. If you’re one among millions of Todoist or Wunderlist users, use Pleexy to sync your Evernote to-dos so you don’t have to bounce back and forth between both apps.
Whether you are new to Evernote or searching for more efficient ways to use the app, these tips will surely help you take notes more productively so you can focus on capturing ideas while effortlessly keeping them organized in one place.
Pleexy is a productivity app that channels tasks from your email, note-taking, mind mapping, and collaboration apps into your Todoist or Microsoft To Do. Follow us on Twitter for more productivity tips.
