12 Surprising Ways to Use Evernote You Might Not Have Considered

I have been using Evernote since early 2008, when it was still in private beta. Since then, it has truly become my digital brain.

Evernote is one of those rare apps I can’t seem to outgrow. I am always finding new uses for it.

In this post, I want to share twelve ways to use Evernote you might find useful, and perhaps, even surprising.

1. Keep your medical records. I keep my doctors’ names and contact information, medications and vitamins, surgeries and illnesses in a single note. This comes in handy whenever I go to a new doctor.

2. Record your license plates. I don’t need this information often, but when I do, I can never remember it. Now I just have a photo for each of my cars.

3. Subscribe to email newsletters. I don’t need more information cluttering up e-mail inbox, so I subscribe using my Evernote email address. (You can find this under Evernote | Account Info.) The newsletters get funneled directly into my database.

4. Take a photo of your printer cartridge. I buy this infrequently enough that I can never remember my printer model, let alone what cartridge I need. With a photo, I can quickly reference it at Costco or my local office supply.

5. Save important email messages. I generally file all my email messages in a singular archive folder. However, occasionally, I want to save a message related to a specific project. I simply forward it to Evernote and add the appropriate tags.

6. Collect reader and listener questions. Whenever someone writes or calls with a question I have not answered, one of my assistants records it in Evernote and adds a “questions” tag. Then when I am looking for blog post or podcast episode inspiration, I review the list.

7. Maintain a packing list. I hate getting to my destination and realizing that I forgot something. That’s why I maintain a comprehensive packing list in Evernote. Here’s the actual list if you want to see what I include.

8. Snap pictures of your child’s art. I got this idea from ShefsKitchen. She takes pictures of her kid’s art and then discards the paper. I have just started doing this with my grandkids. (Psst: Don’t tell them.)

9. Clip web pages to read later. Whenever I come across an article or post I want to read later, I use the Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome. I add a “read later” tag, that way I can get to these clips with a simple saved search. When I have read it, I remove this tag.

10. Record my best haircut. Occasionally, I am unable to book my favorite stylist. The first question the new one asks is, “So how do you want me to cut your hair?” Rather than tell them, I just show them. “Make it look like this.”

11. Save speaker resources. I use Evernote to save all my personal anecdotes, illustrations, case studies, quotes, jokes, and statistics. (These are the actual tags I use.) I store these in a shared notebook called Speaking Resources, so my teammates can add to it.

12. Collect items for meetings. I create a tag for each upcoming meeting. It includes the date and a brief description (e.g., “2014-07-11 – World Domination Summit”). Then, as I create notes about the meeting or receive emails, I simply tag them. I can then sort the tags by name to put them in date order.

This hardly scratches the surface, but hopefully, it will stimulate a few ideas. The more you use Evernote, the more useful it becomes.

By the way, I have written twelve more posts about Evernote. Here is a handy index for all of them.