How I use Evernote to run my life

Evernote serves as the foundation for my trusted system.  It is always available and I can easily access it from whatever device I am using. It syncs across all my devices so it doesn’t matter if I am on my laptop, my smartphone or my tablet because I can easily get information in and out of Evernote.

This is how my trusted system is set up.

Notebooks

I have 16 “Notebooks” which are the collections of individual notes. I also have two “Stacks” (Next Actions and Reference) which are collections of Notebooks.

1. -Unprocessed
2. Agendas
3. Areas of Focus
4. Next Actions:  Anywhere, Errands, Home, Office
5. Projects
6. Reference:  Bay Area, Education, GTD, Information Technology, Receipts, Reference
7. Waiting For
8. Someday/Maybe

Tags

I use “Tags” sparingly and really only use two tags – Today and Weekend. Tags are attributes that you can apply to any individual note. You can then view all notes with a specific tag, regardless of which notebook it resides in. This provides for the ultimate in filing flexibility and many people prefer to use tags as the basis for their system instead of notebooks.

Evernote email address

Each Evernote account is assigned a unique email address. You can find this in the desktop version of Evernote under Evernote – Account Info. Your email address will look like this “username.c12345@m.evernote.com” and you should add this address to your contacts. I created a new contact called, “Evernote” and assigned this email address to it. Now when I want to send a message to Evernote, I simply send it to my new Evernote contact.

Default Notebook

Set your default notebook in Evernote so when you email something to Evernote, it is automatically filed in your default notebook. Mine goes to a notebook named “-Unprocessed.” (I start it with a dash, so that it appears at the top of the sorted list of notebooks.) However, you can set this to anything you want. You can do this in the desktop version of Evernote under Preferences – Clipping.

That’s it. My Trusted System that runs my entire life is in this simple yet powerful tool called Evernote. Next, I show how I use this system to manage everything.