Use Evernote as a document library

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Use Evernote as a document library when focusing on or researching a domain. Such an investigation requires lots of information, documents and references to sites. Evernote is useful as a business library as you can store material and links easily, but also comment on it.

Evernote is great for pouring out thoughts, mind-dumping, you can tag an item and file it away for a rainy day.

Use Evernote as a business library to store business experience for analysis, and problem-solving.

Evernote can be used as a central database and business library for everything, both work and personal subjects, and a note provides a landing page for the knotty subjects.

I create an Evernote for a question, issue or problem and include all relevant information, and then add potential solutions (or lack of) and an indication of the direction taken.

It’s about being mindful of what is happening, of challenges to get through, and is a record of activity.

Sounding board

Evernote provides a base for thoughts, reflections, comments and in doing so, focuses the mind on the problem in hand. And a trace of what happened will remain after resolving the issue.

This audit trail is useful when working alone, since Evernote becomes a mirror in which to reflect. A sole trader has many hats.

Recorded events enable the sole trader to record the data and stand back to analyse it. It takes the feeling out of the auto-management process and adds objectivity.

Problem-Solving

Problem-solving is about expressing the idea, thinking about it, and then mobilising internal and external resources for its resolution. Evernote is the set of cubbyholes into which you can place these problems and solutions.

The trace, the memory, is not neutral. The added value of a business is what it knows, its experience, and Evernote can be used to share information on issues solved across teams.

Unstructured information

From an information systems viewpoint, Evernote generally contains unstructured data/information, as differentiated from structured transactional data such as sales, purchasing and accounting.

Building a business library

Evernote helps to build the recorded business experience and therefore captures the uniqueness of a business, particularly useful in a service environment where we are always looking for the next best offering.

A shared Evernote environment can help this R&D effort by providing sources for continuous improvement or moving new ideas into action.

Links between notes

We are used to URLs now on the internet, but Evernote provides that function on your desktop. You can refer to a piece of work or a document by a URL within Evernote. Indeed, it is even shareable publicly. So this is a great boon. You can only do that in Windows Explorer by creating file://links.

Linking documents together builds valuable references. Your files are no longer isolated. Filing, tagging and linking notes help to compose posts by bringing together initially disparate data into writing.

Different types of link

1 – Add an ‘In link’ to reference a note in another.
2 – Use a reference link to include a useful source of background information.
3 – The standard inline link, referring to another note as part of a text.

Tags – the horizontal dimension

What makes Evernote interesting is the ability to tag, which gives you an additional dimension with which to work. A vertical one from notebooks (like Windows folders) and a horizontal one, which you don’t have with files.

Evernote as a Document Library

Google desktop was a fantastic product that indexed the local machine and provided a search box on a navigator to search by keyword, just as we now do on the web. But they stopped it – why o why? Perhaps to incite people to put documents on the internet.

But having discovered that and having it so cruelly taken away, I searched for a replacement that would allow me to index my stored documents in a library, and I found Evernote. It’s something Microsoft should build into their OS!

On all platforms

Evernote is on all platforms – phone, tablet, desktop and Mac.

Evernote combined with other services

A few excellent connectors to Evernote have died, notably Carddesk and moh.io. It is unclear why they were unable to find a stable business model. Organisation tool Ayoa survives in its own right and connects to Evernote, Nozbe too.

My experience of Gneo, organising tasks as an Eisenhower grid, is of great potential but unfortunately not sufficiently stable technically.

A publishing platform with postach.io

Publish from your Evernote document library.
One is with postach.io, a blogging platform which allows you to create a blog directly from Evernote.
Second is the shareable link. Once you share a note, it has a public URL, to which you can refer anywhere on the web.

With moh.io – moh.io is dead 🙁

Evernote was much more when moh.io was around; it allowed you to connect notes visually and tag notes by dragging. Extremely useful to combine quickly notes into domains, organise notes, collect subjects. Evernote should buy it themselves.

Evernote combined with Kanbanote

Kanbanote turns Evernote into a kanban presentation

A note can then be opened directly from there.

Use Evernote as your document library for everything small or large.