13 Evernote Tips for Businesspeople

You can use the popular note-taking service Evernote to plan a film shoot, keep track of job candidates or build your own stock image library, among other things. Evernote and its apps sync across multiple devices and integrate with lots of other third-party software. In other words, the possibilities with Evernote are limited only by your imagination. Here are 13 cool, offbeat and just-plain-useful Evernote productivity hacks, all of which are recommended by a set of businesspeople that regularly use them to increase their personal productivity.

Evernote is “the only way I can slay the mythical ‘inbox zero’ dragon,” says Doyle Albee, president of Metzger Albee Public Relations. “Instead of leaving email sitting in my inbox, I answer it, delete it or put it in Evernote with a reminder for the appropriate day to take action. Since Evernote takes all the attachments, too, it’s easy to remember what to do several days later. Plus, my email inbox doesn’t get full and push messages down to the point where they’re forgotten or overlooked.” Albee says he’s been using Evernote in this way for about a year and is pleased with the results. Gmail also has some great plug-ins for email management, according to Albee, though he uses EverMail for Apple’s Mac OS X Mail app.

Ryan Fahey, inbound marketing specialist with InfoSec Institute, tracks and archives email from competitors in Evernote. Fahey creates a Gmail account specifically for each competitor he wants to track and uses that email address to subscribe to a competitor’s mailing list. From there, he sets up Gmail filters to automatically archive incoming messages and mark them as read. He also uses a “recipe” from the Web service If This Then That (IFTTT) to automatically generate a new Evernote note in a designated notebook for each archived message. “This allows me to track what our competitors are doing in terms of email marketing and adjust our strategy accordingly,” Fahey says.

Nik Kumar, cofounder of Tribeca Mobile, says his company developed a mobile app that integrates with Evernote, called CallSmart. During, or right after, a phone call, the app displays a small window that gives users the option to take notes about a call and quickly capture thoughts on what was said, as well as create task lists and reminders. CallSmart notes are automatically saved to Evernote.

C.J. Johnson, a filmmaker and head of marketing for Buddytruk, used Evernote in all of the production phases in his short science-fiction film “Genesis“. “Because of our small budget, Evernote was perfect to use for planning,” Johnson says. “From reading scripts to drafting storyboards to creating checklists of items needed for production, I used every aspect of Evernote for my film.” Evernote helped Johnson keep his ideas and notes organized and gave him access to shot lists and script notes using his iOS devices. “I didn’t have to use Excel, Word or any other program,” he says. “I could keep everything in one place.”

Scott J. Peterson, cofounder of The Velo Project and an Evernote Business Certified Consultant, leads a board of directors. Peterson says he often needs to access five or six of the same documents, which include a list of committee assignments, a calendar, a roster and other content. To quickly access those documents, he created an Evernote Table of Contents, which sits atop his Evernote account, making linked notes easily available “instead of having to scroll” for them.