Thing 9: Evernote

The latest thing is preaching to the converted for me as I'm a big fan of Evernote. Having said that, I can see I'm not nearly using it to its full advantage as I rarely clip or store things, I mostly use it for writing my own notes. It has replaced a notebook for me (apart from when I'm in meetings and have no computer) to store my thoughts, plans, research etc. Why I love it:

• I can access it anywhere: from home, on the desk, on my mobile. Very quick & easy to look something up. A little bit trickier to edit and write notes via the web interface but I have it installed on my office PC which is where I usually do most of my work.
• Requires no additional software to open e.g. you don't need Word.
• I like the organization of it: notes filed in notebooks or tagged or very easy to cross-search all your notes.
• Easy to share something: usually I use the Email option to send some notes to somebody else. I'm not very public with my Evernote as it's all my informal notes rather than polished documents.

The only bad side to Evernote is that its updates have a bit of a heavyweight installation (everything needs to be closed) but then again that's nothing compared to Windows Updates which grind my computer to a halt and ask me 20 times a day if I want to restart now (NO!) and then do it anyway when I'm not looking...

Not many excuses for a photo of pretty elephants but Evernote is one!
Photo courtesy of  Photo Catcher on Flickr under Creative Commons licence

Example things I use Evernote for: keeping all my cataloguing notes together; writing up meetings or events for my own reflection; researching ideas on a topic e.g. how to spice up inductions; keeping everything on a topic together (so I may copy in emails as well as notes).

I agree that it's more flexible than Google Docs - I tend only to use Google Docs for drafting "official" documents where I need to collaborate or make them public. However sometimes I do get myself in a tizzy with stuff in both places.