I live 56 miles from my mom’s house. 
My mom travels for work a lot and my brother’s job starts at some ungodly early hour so occasionally I have to fill in to let people in. This morning I was supposed to meet a furniture repairman at my mom’s house at 9:30. My daughter wanted to spend the day with my grandparents today instead of dealing with the repairman so I had to drop her off first.
I set my alarm for 7 and 7:15 so I’d be up in time to meet the guy.
Yeah…. I set the alarm for 7 p.m. We were really late leaving. Obviously I needed to call the company that was sending the repairman so that he wouldn’t leave because I was late. I would have been kind of irritated to drive all that way… you know what I mean? My mom didn’t have the number and of course I didn’t save this random company phone number in my phone.
Then
I thought that I had taken down the notes of what my mom needed in Evernote. I was able to simply do a voice search through my notes with my phone and find the number, without going through a lot of trouble.
Gave me some reassurance so I was able to relax and thought “OH I need to slow down” (instead of flying down the interstate which I, of course, was doing.) I passed a cop like a quarter mile later. 
See I know most people don’t understand Evernote. The first time you log into it, you are sort of like “What the crap am I supposed to do with this?” I’m one of those people who would forget what I was currently doing if I didn’t write it down. There is no running to the store for one quick item without a list, because I would come back with everything BUT what I actually needed. I swear I do it all the time. (I’ll write a post about my grad research into forgetfulness soon.) So I used Evernote or I tell my daughter what item is super important to remember.
I use Evernote for everything from clipping web articles to refer to later, keeping up with my grad school work, and shopping lists, to phone messages. I also use it to keep up with my daughter’s clothes sizes and things she needs for school. I use it to plan blog posts and guest tour blog posts, and if I’m in a hurry I might just put a blog post title
in the title box to work on later.
I keep a list of my food allergies in Evernote so if I’m at the doctor and they want the full list I can usually email it to the doctor and they put it in their digital file. Most doctors really like it when they ask and then can see it on their screen seconds later.
Isn’t it just a fancy notepad?
Sort of, but it has some fancy features too. You can record voice notes easily and clip webpages with a button click. It syncs my notes to my phone, my tablet, my Linux desktop, and my laptop. I can also access it from a web browser anywhere. It’s simple to share my notes with my assistants.
And then there are the photo features.
I do a lot of research. For my business, grad school and genealogy.
So in Evernote, I can search the text in my photos. Take a look:
I searched the word “God”:
I got 17 results but some of them were for Seth Godin.
So if I’m reading a psychology journal for grad school and I see a passage that I might use in the future for a paper or assignment, I can take a picture of it with my phone and search it to find it later.
In grad school everything is about documentation, so I either note the book, author and page number in the title of the note or I include a second image in my note of the Copyright page of the book.
Other Features
Evernote has a lot of add-on capabilities. They have a photo app called Skitch where you can draw and edit on photos. There is an app called Evernote Hello, where you snap a picture of someone you just met and then add in their contact information instead of trying to keep up with a card. There is Evernote Food (imagine what you do with it.) You can check everything in their “trunk” here: http://evernote.com/trunk/
Oh and Evernote is free…
Any questions about Evernote or how I use it?
