Work Smarter with Evernote. Alexandra Samuel

      What This Book Is Not, and Where to Learn More

      This guide is not a comprehensive Evernote manual, walking you through the many technical features of the Evernote software. Instead, it quickly gives you the big picture of how to use Evernote to work smarter and introduces only those features that will significantly increase your professional effectiveness. It explains how to use those features in ways you may not have considered. It doesn’t have screen shots or step-by-step instructions. Instead, it’s a guide that suggests best practices and the most important things you can and should do with Evernote. If you’re looking for more details on the interface and features not covered here, I recommend Evernote’s excellent online resources, as well as the ebook Evernote Essentials.

      Nor is it an extension of any of the established productivity religions, though followers of Stephen Covey, David Allen, and other productivity gurus will find many techniques that fit into their work flows. (Getting Things Done [GTD] adherents will also be interested in Dan Gold’s Evernote: The Unofficial Guide to Capturing Everything and Getting Things Done, and Braintoniq’s The Secret Weapon.) And while some of the suggestions can help you keep your home and family life organized (a topic that you can explore in more depth by checking out A Mom’s Guide to Evernote), this book is primarily focused on using Evernote to support your professional development and effectiveness. Work Smarter with Evernote is the only Evernote guide that focuses on using the tool not just for immediate productivity gains, but for building long-term professional success.

      Finally, as an application that runs on multiple platforms and devices, each version of Evernote works a bit differently, and this book is not a comprehensive guide to each one. Depending on which version of Evernote you’re using, your interface may work slightly differently from what is described here. For example, with the arrival of Evernote 5.0 for your Mac (in November 2012), the new “Shortcuts” feature makes it even easier to prioritize your key notebooks, stacks, and notes. As the platform evolves you may find new ways to adapt the way you use Evernote, based on the principles outlined in this book.

      About Me

      The guidance in this book draws on my personal experience using Evernote for over four years, as well as my professional experience working in the social web since it first developed as a concept—and even before. From my PhD research at Harvard, where I began my dissertation work by investigating the impact of the Internet on the modern workplace, to my role leading social media for online research giant Vision Critical, I have spent sixteen years helping professionals and organizations work more effectively online.

      Evernote has been a core part of the toolkit I use, and of the toolkit I recommend. When I started using Evernote in 2008 (and wrote my first blog post about it), the service had just 250,000 users; as of this writing, it’s got 34 million. In those four years, I have trained thousands of people in how to use social web tools such as Evernote to transform both their own work and the businesses and organizations they work for. In my work at Vision Critical, we’ve used Evernote for everything from collaborating on presentations to sharing data sets among colleagues.

      I also blog about social media and productivity for Harvard Business Review, and one look at the comments on my hbr.org blog shows how many people are struggling with the challenges of information overload—challenges that Evernote can help to address. The strategies in this book aim to answer those challenges and, in fact, draw on reports from my own on- and offline colleagues about the professional payoffs of using Evernote and other social tools.

      This book will help you achieve both the productivity wins you can get by adopting some of the tricks I share here and the big-picture professional gains of working in a more focused, intentional way. Evernote can support both sides of that equation, if you know how to use it to capture, organize, and share your work as effectively as possible.