Evernote Dashboard & Templates
Last May I told you about Evernote. I’ve used Evernote since 2008 to store all my details of life, critical down to useless. Useless, because sometimes you cannot tell when you first encounter a piece of information if it is going to end up being critical or useless, or something in between.
This is how I use Evernote when sitting at my desk. Another time we’ll talk about its awesome usefulness away from the desk.
Above is Evernote’s Home page. It can be a dashboard to your life if you set it up correctly.
There can be panels for your Calendar (from Google), a list of Notebooks, a Pinned Note, a scratchpad, tasks, and a list of tags.
If you subscribe to Evernote’s Professional Plan, you get a panel for a Filtered List of notes. Also with Personal Plan you get more panels than the free level, and with Professional Plan you get even more.
Evernote has three plans : Free, Personal for $9 a month, and Professional for $11 a month.
Focus on the panel in the bottom right of the image.
It is my Personal Dashboard. It is just a pinned Note.
In it I have internal links to a few of my most important notes. One for Home Vendors (plumbers, electricians etc.), Prescriptions, a list of Doctors, and information about our Vehicles. If I was at the Professional Plan I could have a panel for Filtered Notes, so I wouldn’t have to maintain this list manually. For $24 a year savings, I will do it manually until Professional has another feature I’d pay to have.
The panel in the upper left is my most recent notes, upper right are shortcuts to my most needed notes. Bottom left are Tasks connected to notes. In the middle is a scratchboard. It is a nice little area for quick notes you make during the day. It is easy then to make on of them a note to retain it.
These panels along with search give me quick access to current notes.
If I need to make a call, lets say to find a new lawn guy, I open a new note.
If I want to, I can use a template, either one I create a pre-made one.
If I pay an online bill, I can use Evernotes web clipper to save the receipt to Evernote.
If I receive an important email, I can forward it to my Evernote email address. It will appear as a note, that I can add tags to or file in an appropriate Notebook.
If I need to follow-up on the information in a note, I can add a task to remind myself.
I can create a link from this note to another. When I’m in a note, I see not only links to other notes, but a list of what notes link to this note.
If I don’t want to take the time to organize notes with tags or by collecting them into separate emails, I can find them by just searching for words that I know are in the note. Or I can look at the notes sequentially by creation date if sort of know when the note might have been created.
Evernote can be an important tool to keep your life on track. I use it as one of a suite of tools, like a calendar, a to do list, contact list etc. We’ll visit each of these in times.