Have you ever been on a site visit and struggled with capturing the details of the property, your ideas for meeting setups, and wondered how you would find the time to incorporate your photos into your notes in an easy and meaningful way. Then read on to learn more about an invaluable tool that should immediately add to your arsenal.
I’m lucky enough to play with lots of the news tools and services released by the innovative tech community. Many of these fall short of expectation but every so often, one of them will really impress me with it’s aesthetics, ease-of-use, features, price, and sometimes a combination of these. When this happens, I will be a true evangelist for the product to everyone i think will benefit from its use.
Evernote is a service that has exceeded my expectations and it’s definitely one of the first tools I mention to someone when we start talking about productivity and organization.
Evernote keeps all of your text notes, voice notes, pictures, videos, and web clippings in notebooks in your cloud account. You can upload notes with a free WindowsPC or Mac OSX application or with a free app on your iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Palm Pre, or Windows Mobile device. You can keyword tag your notes to easily find them later. Useful kids of tags are names of events, meetings, companies, projects, or status tags like ToDo or Pending. Notes created or edited using GPS-enabled devices are automatically Geo-tagged so you can find notes by browsing a map. Picture notes are processed on the Evernote servers which allows you to search by words or handwriting in the photo. I regularly use it to locate my snapshots of whiteboard conversation by targeting a word that I had written on the board.
While the uses for Evernote are endless, i think it shines as a site visit journal. Capture photos of rooms and function spaces, take video of the truly impressive hotel features or possible meeting venues, key in your ideas about possible setups and venues, even snapshot business cards of the meetings staff so you have their contact info later and tag these notes with anything possible meeting types so later you can search by that meeting type and see the notes on a map of the hotels that match your needs.
The basic service of Evernote is free. An annual subscription buys you increased storage and enhanced features but the free service will get you started and then some.
Hopefully you’ll try it out and when you do, if you like it, let others know how you use it and why they’ll benefit from it too. Do you use Evernote? I’d love to hear how you use it to save time throughout your day.
by on August 16, 2010
