Recently I have been trying to figure out a better way to organize my thoughts, time, and especially the information that I encounter on a daily basis. I have been spending a considerable about of time on the internet lately learning how to better learn on my own. I really have not been good about using the internet as a source of new material to learn from and I think that the main reason fro that is that I do not know how to organize the information I stumble across on the internet. I always seem to find 'cool' bits of stories or different perspectives on a subject but I am not good at linking new information I find to stuff I have read earlier.
So that is where my recent discovery of Evernote comes into play. It is a service used to collect and organize information. For me it has been most helpful in putting new information that I find into a single location that I then can search and go back to that information later. It is really simple to use and easy to get started.
The first step is to sign up at their main website. You can chose whether to just have an internet account or download the program for free. Both the internet account and the program on your personal can be synced by pressing a button. All information is stored as a 'note.' You can create notebooks which are basically like folders in which different notes are stored. You then have the options of sharing these folders with other users who can then edit and add information to them. This is great for people working on a mutual project. Each can access the same notebook and add or edit notes within that notebook.
The way that I have been using Evernote is to gather information for blog post that I have been thinking about creating. For example I have been working on gathering information for a post about the effect the internet is having on newspapers. I downloaded an extension to Google Chrome for Evernote that allows me to instantly store the information from a website I am looking at in my Evernote notebook. It shows up the Evernote icon on my toolbar and all I have to do it click it and it stores the site I am looking at in my notebook on Evernote. Before I had to create a word document and copy and paste the websites I was finding into the word document. This add on circumvents that entire process and allows me to work much more effeciently.
I have only scratched the surface on what Evernote can do but I really like what I have been able to do so far. I am hoping to find more great features.
