Monday is always the day of the week dedicated to organising stuff. Today I made sure my e-mail inbox was empty and that I had no unlistened podcasts left. I want to keep on track so badly, and without help I cannot do that anymore, there’s just too much on my plate. Without Remember The Milk and Google Calender, my life would be a complete chaos. What I basically do is try to get my stuff as much in one place as I possibly can, access that from everywhere even when I left stuff at home. Therefore Google’s apps are a blessing, as well as Remember The Milk, I cannot live without them. But I still have this desk full of papers and I receive things in the mail, get receits I have to save somewhere and that’s just a mess. I cannot keep that organized.

Today I decided to do something with the Evernote invitation that’s been in my inbox for ages, after I heard lots of people raving about it. It basically functions as an external memory. If you see something you need to remember, just take a picture of it, clip it to the clipboard if it’s online and save it to Evernote. It will be synced to a central server and is accessible from the Web, from a Windows app, a Mac app, you mobile phone etc. There’s even an app for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. This sounded great, so I decided to give it a try.

I started organizing by making folders for the different kinds of notes, searched all my loose notes, pieces of paper I needed to keep and found a big cardboard box to put them in. One by one I scanned them into my MacBook using the iSight and put them in the box. It took me an hour or so to have everything digitalized, but the neat thing is, that Evernote is able to search text in photos and it even recognizes handwriting. Don’t ask me how they do it, but it’s possible. It just works.

My desk is empty now, apart from a staple, a thing to punch holes with in paper and my pencils, memo notes etc. I want to buy a small cabinet from IKEA to put those things away in.  I know I’m going to love my paperless desktop from now on and I never forget anything anymore.

Links:

• Evernote
• The Apple Blog on Evernote

Posted under Tips & Tricks