Evernote

I have been searching for a software product to help me better organize all of my ongoing projects and voluminous notes. I have 4 or 5 meetings per day where I end up with 2 or 3 pages of notes from each meeting. Each meeting generates 3 or 4 new contacts, and several tasks that need doing. The stack of paper in my briefcase grows each day. I’m literally drowning in scraps of paper where I often forget to note the person’s (or meeting’s) name and date.

I’ve been looking for something that would be a work solution (i.e. secure) with many of the features I love about blogs with ways to tag the various notes together into some organized fashion. I’ve been browsing CNET downloads  looking for something I could use at both home and work (that easily synchronized) that had a journal function with perhaps some features of mind mapping to tie the various projects together.

This morning I was accepted into the Evernote Beta. I had installed their basic desktop freeware version (Evernote 2.2) a few days ago and thought it would do, at least on one computer, everything I needed. Beta is better. I can work with it from a web browser much like blogging. It will synchronize to the desktop version. It’s password protected both on the desktop and on the web. It can hold images, text, hand written notes, and web clips (using their snappy integrated clipper). I even have a proprietary email address so I can email content into a "note" anytime, anywhere. I don’t have an iPhone but this beta-version also allows real time access to all of your notes from the appropriate portable device. I’m sure that I don’t yet know half of what it can do but I’m delighted. I suspect I will fall in love with it. I just hope that whatever user fee they ultimately set is something I can afford.