Still Kicking! Evernote Vs the World

- I wanna take a look at an old friend today with fresh eyes and the old friend is Evernote. Which has, admittedly, been a bit beat up in the online space lately by us as well as others. There's lots of competition, they've lost some senior management and they've gotten beat up over the last maybe year and a half. But I also recognize that I still use Evernote everyday and it still works really well for me. It's a tool that I still rely on. So I got to thinking you know, maybe Evernote's kind of like a spouse. You had that honeymoon period where you loved this person and everything they did was wonderful and fresh and then you got married and, over the years, the little idiosyncrasies that are maybe not quite perfect, got to bother you and you start to see the flaws rather than the benefits. But, if you're good and you're a good communicator, you also then maybe take a step back and say oh wait a minute these are the things that attracted me to this person in the first place. So welcome to Dotto Tech where today we're gonna do relationship advice. Our relationship with Evernote. Why it's worth rededicating ourselves to Evernote. I think I have begun to take Evernote for granted. It's shows in how I criticize it for its shortcomings and it also shows the fact that I use it everyday still. I rely on it, it is the rock that is still the base of my productivity system. Yet there I am happy to criticize away with the rest of the productivity crowd at Evernote's obvious shortcomings. Well I think it's time that we took a step back and said, what is it about Evernote that attracted us to it in the first place? Are they still valid? Are the benefits that Evernote gave us back at the beginning and the reason that we built our systems around Evernote still valid? And, if we take a step back and look at it honestly, at least as far as I'm concerned, that is still the case. So I wanna share with you today a few of the solid features that first attracted me to Evernote and have not changed. And it all starts where so much of Evernote begins, with the Evernote web clipper. For the longest time now, the Evernote web clipper has set the standard for web clippers. Now what is a web clipper? A web clipper is a tool that plugs into your browser that allows you to take information that you find on a website and copy and paste it into a notebook of some sort. To save it for future reference. And the Evernote web clipper is really, as far as I'm concerned, the standard by which all web clippers are measured. Nobody else has quite an elegant and efficient a web clipper as does Evernote. Now it installs in any browser that you have and you can see the web clipper here in my menu bar available to me. Now how I use it everyday as a part of my research, hasn't changed in probably six or seven years. As I'm prepping my daily work, doing research, learning about new products. I come across websites on a constant basis that have valuable information that I want to use as a resource for come future video that we're gonna create or maybe a course that we're gonna create. Now, back in the day, I could've taken that information, I could've copied the URL into a document somewhere and then tried to remember where that was or perhaps I could've saved it as a bookmark which, if you stop and think about it, is one of the most ridiculous things that we use. Have you ever found anything in a bookmark again when you've bookmarked it? Very seldom let's admit it. Very seldom. At least for random things. However, with the Evernote web clipper, let's say, here it is, 36 tips every Evernote user must know. I lifted liberally from this article for this particular video. It's from PC Magazine. So I just go into the web clipper and say, I'd like to save this for future reference. When I click on the web clipper, it invokes an action, when it pops up here, it allows me to save the clip and I've got some controls that allow me to determine exactly how that information is going to be saved. Now all of this is in relating to my Evernote account, is relating to how it's gonna be saved in Evernote. I can save the article and you can see here with a green border the it's highlighting the article. I can save a simplified article which is beautifully going to strip all of the advertising and accoutrements out of the article as I save it. I like that. If I wanna save the full page, I can choose that, if I just wanna save a bookmark for this, I can also save that. Or I can save a screenshot which will give me a graphic of webpage. I can also choose exactly where it's gonna be saved to. Which of my notebooks it's gonna be saved into and I can add tags, such as demo, so that I know that this is going to be something that I can then search for later when I'm looking for ideas for creating the demos that we do for our videos. I can add remarks to this if I choose and then, when I click save clip, a wonderful piece of magic happens. It takes this article and it copies the information that I've asked it to copy and it saves it into the Evernote notebook, where I've asked it to save it and makes it available to me for search later on. Now this is one of the keys to the Evernote web clipper and actually the entire Evernote universe. Is I don't necessarily have to go back into that notebook to search. Visual search, the whole concept of visual search, has really kind of gone by the wayside. Instead now, now that I've stored this article, when I'm searching for ideas on Evernote and I go into search, this article will pop up in search in Evernote search or actually in Google search because Google search actually relates to my Evernote account as well. It's got an integration with my Evernote account that this article will come up when I'm searching for resources to do future stories on Evernote. That is the beauty of it. Do you wanna see? Let me show you. Let me jump into my Evernote account, and, by now that article, should've been saved here. Let's just scroll up to the very top, I've got hundreds... There it is. So here's the article saved here within Evernote. This is a thing of beauty. Very few days go by that I am not still clipping something into Evernote and saving it and the Evernote web clipper, this concept also works on your smartphone. Although it's a slightly different action on the smartphone. I won't spend time showing you that today. But essentially, anything I ever see online that I want access to again, I never save bookmarks, I never create notes in a text document, I clip it in Evernote and then return to it in the future, I find it through Evernote. And actually let me just jump in, it won't be quite perfect right now but let me go in to Google search on my browser and I'm gonna type in Evernote to show you something that happens as well. Evernote. If I do a Google search for Evernote, as you expect, down the side here we get all of the normal search that happens within Google. But, because I'm using Evernote Premium, I've got access here as well to the search results within my Evernote account pop up here. Now it hasn't quite resolved everything yet, it doesn't have the information from that new note in here yet. It takes a little while for it to populate through the entire system. But, when I do searches, Evernote comes up in my search results on a regular basis so it's really an integral part. When I say that I take Evernote for granted, it's this kind of integration that I have slowly taken for granted because it's something that I just use everyday. It's just a part of my day to day process. So Evernote's still vital. Evernote's still an important partner and it all begins, as far as I'm concerned, with the Evernote web clipper. The next thing that I find really invaluable on Evernote, is the fact that Evernote is ubiquitous. My Evernote account lives in the cloud. All of my documents live in the cloud. And regardless of which device I'm on, whether it be my iPhone, my notebook computer, my iPad, or my desktop computer, I have access to the exact same information wherever I am and whenever I am. So if I now, just moments after I saved that document, go into all of my notes here on my smartphone, right there at the very top, we see I've got the exact same note here available to me as I have on my desktop computer and this fact that my entire Evernote account goes with me and is on every device, is invaluable. I mean imagine if you were going to lunch with a friend and you had clipped an Evernote article that morning or the day before and you're having a conversation with a friend and the topic comes up of something that you'd actually clipped into Evernote. Now, how would you have gotten that information, if you wanna share the information, how would you have gotten it to them in the past? You would've said, Oh when I get home I've got a document there that I clipped or that I saved onto my computer that I'll share with you and I'll remember to email that to you when I get home. You don't have to do that anymore. You're sitting down you go, oh wow I saw this great article on Evernote today, here just a minute, open it up on my phone, here it is, I can send it to you right away. This ubiquitous nature of having what you need, when you need it and where you need it is a core principle and a core value that Evernote still delivers in spades. Now, before we go on, in the spirit of full disclosure, I am not an affiliate of Evernote in any way, I don't make money if you choose to use Evernote, I don't have any official relationship. Actually I don't even think I know anybody at Evernote. So, if you're watching from Evernote, say hi. Don't be a stranger. But I do wanna let you know that I've got this great quick start guide that we designed that I think helps you get off on the right foot if you're thinking about starting using Evernote. I really worked hard on coming up with a great concept for the best way for you to understand the value of Evernote and get started using Evernote. And let me find the link for you. Actually, this shows you a great idea, here's all of the links to all of my different little mini courses, let's just quickly find Evernote in this document that I've got here, and Evernote habits? Evernote quick start, here it is right here. So I'll put this link in below, in the description below for you to take a look but this is the Evernote quick start guide. This is where you can sign up for a free course with us at dottotechu. It takes about an hour or so to take the entire course. Farley, go sit down. I'm telling them about my course, go and lay down on your bed. Yeah. Sorry for the interruption. This is a free guide that will get you started off on the right foot of Evernote. Actually, before I go on, the links will be, of course, below. Before I go on, did you see how I resourced that? How I went to that? Down here on the left hand side of my Evernote account, I'm just showing you my Evernote account here. This is all of the notes down here down the middle. I have thousands, maybe tens of thousands of notes in Evernote, in all of my different notebooks et cetera. But the short cuts down the side here, these are my most relevant documents or notebooks. These are the ones I go back to and use time and time again. And the ones that I use the most are this link library here, which is a link of all of the different free resources that we have. So, whenever I'm doing a live stream, or people are asking me, "How do I get to this or that?" All of the different list builders and links to our mini courses and our full courses, I have here in this link library and this is just a dynamic document that I copy and paste constantly links into. Similarly, from a business perspective, here are all of the different affiliate links that I've got for the different affiliate products that we work with. And again, this is a messy document, this is a working document but it shows you really how Evernote works because I copy and paste the different relevant links in here so I have access to them when I need them and where I need them. And with all of these notes as well, I share them with my team so they also have access, in their Evernote account, to these same links. It just kind of gives you a peek on how Evernote, kind of where the rubber meets the road and, again, how we end up using Evernote almost everyday in some aspect of our business to the point that we sometimes end up, as I've said, taking it for granted. The next thing I want to talk to you about is emailing to Evernote. Sending an email with Evernote as an email address. And this is a terrific way for you to take your important documents that you receive in email and then send them from email, into Evernote for archiving or for future reference. I don't think email is the best place for us to store important communications that we need to find later. It's good for instant communications, going back and forth while you're in an email thread and having a conversation. But going and searching through your email archives for important conversations, not always the best place to source those documents. Instead, with important documents, I like to email them and forward the email into Evernote and if you have an Evernote Premium account, attached to that is an email address that you can use that you can address as an email, let me just start, to Evernote so that it then sends that email into Evernote. Now you can use this strategically in other ways than just forwarding your email. You can actually use Evernote as an account that you can capture email from other people. You can capture information or people requesting information et cetera. You can use it almost as a server to host different email type communications. But, for the most part, I use it to archive important information that I want to store for future reference. Again, this is a premium feature with Evernote Premium but it is ever so valuable a feature. The next thing that I tend to take for granted but really do appreciate with Evernote is the mobile version of Evernote's camera. Now Evernote actually has an app, for iOS called Scannable which turns your phone into a terrific scanner and it does a really good job of allowing you to capture documents. I use Scannable a lot, it is one of my favorite apps. But, just the camera that's built into Evernote itself, can be used for so many things and they've really upped the number of features that it has available. So let me just get this recording and let me show you how the Evernote camera works. In order to access the camera, you just hit on the plus sign and then choose the camera tool and it launches the camera. And it actually has a smart select so, I don't have very many good documents but I did get a notice to get Farley back to the vet for an appointment. So watch how, if I just highlight and point the camera at that document, it identifies the document and captures the document. There it is. It captures the document and it recognizes that it's a document. You see how it says here document? It could also be a photograph or a color document or business card. It captures that information, it'll save it in Evernote. If it's a business card it'll save it as contacts as well. But here's the cool thing that happens and this is something that I discovered way back in one of the first times that I used Evernote and it still blows me away. Evernote takes an image like this and it OCRs all of the text that it finds within a document so that you can then, later on within Evernote, do a search for any words that happen to be in any document you've captured. Now that works if it's a receipt from a restaurant, so you can do a search for the receipt from the restaurant. Or it works for signs on windows or on street posts. I've gotta share one little extra demo with you around that character recognition. And it blew me away the first time that I discovered this, way back when I first starting using Evernote. I'll check the date of the note when we find it. I took a picture of a wine bottle at a restaurant which I thought was a really nice wine. You know how when you go and have a bottle of wine, you forget which wine you got when you're at the liquor store later? What wine did we have that night? So this was a Chilean wine so I'm just gonna type in Chile and wine and watch what happens in the search, there it is. It comes up with that bottle of wine that I... Now look at the date of it. July 2011, that's how long I've been using Evernote. I said nearly 10 years. It is close to 10 years that Evernote's been a part of my life. This is one of the earlier notes that I took. But you see here, down the bottom, that it pulled out the words out of the label for search. That is just spectacular. How it will still find what you're looking for, when you're looking for it. Even if it's just an image of the text, it will pass out that text and bring it up in Evernote search. Which is really the heart of using Evernote. You might notice that my account looks pretty messy. Every time that I've kind of taken you into my Evernote account and looked at anything within the account, how many notes we have and it seems a little cacophonous and unorganized. That's because you don't have to visually organize your notes within Evernote. As you get to use it more and more. Learning to master Evernote search to find what it is you're looking for, is a far more effective way to manage your accounts. So, capturing everything that you need to capture. Regardless of the device, be it your smart phone, your tablet, your computer, capturing the information into Evernote, trusting that you can find it later on through search, is one of the core premises to using Evernote and it's something that we should not take for granted. The last feature I'm gonna share with you today that we shouldn't take for granted in Evernote, is the sharing and collaboration aspect of Evernote. And you can use this in a variety of different ways. But, with our small team, as I mentioned to you a little bit earlier, I've got a couple of these different catch all documents that has all of the relevant links or all of our affiliate links. So what we can do with this is I can go under the sharing menu here and I can give individuals permission to view this document or I can create a shareable link that I can share with others. Understanding the nature of Evernote, that Evernote is a web service, it's a cloud service. Every one of our notes, although we look at it as a note in Evernote, Evernote sees every one of those notes as a web page so each one has an internet address that you can direct people to if you give them permission to view it. So people can view these links even if they don't have Evernote. They can view it just in their browser. So, with my team, I can share documents that I need. So, for example, when we're broadcasting live in a live stream, if my team needs to access any of our affiliate links, even if it's a brand new affiliate link that maybe I haven't shared with them in any other form, by opening this note, which they know has all of our affiliate links in it, they can then access that dynamic document. In fact we use Evernote, within Dotto Tech, as a publishing platform where we actually publish content. We publish an entire course on Evernote, using Evernote's shared note feature as a delivery mechanism. 'Cause I can email the link out and people can click on it and see the lesson plan that we've laid out within Evernote. So the sharing and collaboration features within Evernote are also still a really relevant feature. I started out today's video with the premise that there's still a lot of value in Evernote and it is a relationship that I still rely on and it's a tool that I still use. And despite all the shiny, new notebook options that we have out there, Evernote's still the notebook tool that I come home to and I carry around in my pocket everyday. And I don't see that changing in the short term. Certainly Evernote does have to address a few shortcomings as far as security goes and they're starting to look a little long in the tooth with some of the features. But, when you take a step back and you say, these are things that I use, these are things that are proven and part of my productivity system, these are things that work for me. All of a sudden, you can take a look at Evernote and you can still appreciate the excellence that was originally designed into the app. Would like to see them improve, would like to challenge them to make Evernote even better in the future but the features that I've just talked about today are just some of the features that make Evernote, still, the core tool that I use at the heart of my productivity system. So consider this sort of my rededication to Evernote. I'm publicly declaring my affection for Evernote once again and I'm sorry if I left you with the impression that I was indeed ready to part ways with Evernote. Not the case. We're good. I hope you found today's video useful. Links below for other videos that we have on Evernote. If you haven't yet subscribed to this channel, make sure that you subscribe and ring the notification bell and comment, please comment. Tell me what you think about Evernote and do not forget to give us a thumbs up on this video if you found it valuable. It's always good to have some props from the community. 'Til next time, I'm Steve Dotto. Have fun storming a castle.