Going Paperless With Evernote: All The Things

This is the last blog post in this series about how Evernote has helped me to stay paperless.

HERE we talked about how I keep all of my recipes in Evernote. 

HERE you can find how I have discarded those giant user manuals, but they are still super easy to access in Evernote. 

HERE I talk about how I deal with daily paper and keep it from taking over my life.

In this post I want to share with you how Evernote has allowed me to keep all of the random lists and notes organized.

One of my folders in Evernote is called “My Notes.” You know that meeting you were at and you wrote some notes where you want to be sure to keep the notes? Yet if I write them in a notebook, or even in my planner, and try to find them in a year or so I likely will not be able to. 

The great news is that you can create folders for whatever you need. As I use Evernote more, I have created more folders. 

Here are some examples of folders I use:

1. Recipes. We talked about that HERE.

2. User Manuals. HERE

3. Packing Lists (more on this later)

4. My Lists - This is a folder I keep lists for everything. Books I want to read. To Do Lists for our house. Annual goals that my husband I go over every quarter. 

5. Contacts/Business Cards - Evernote has a great feature that pulls contact info from business cards for you. This is a perfect place to keep that business card of a company you want to remember or a specialist doctor’s info. Because the Evernote phone app is so easy to use, I like to snap the photo right then so I don’t lose it. Then I can put the card back or toss it.

6. My Notes - this is where I keep all the random things. 

   1. My daughter’s teacher sent home a paper packet that I knew I might need to reference at some point later in the school year. I added it to this folder and then I had easy access to it all year.

   2. Our church Leadership team has regular meetings. I started a 2020 note when we met for our planning meeting last fall. So now when we have a monthly or quarterly meeting, I can add those notes to that document and they are so easy to find.

   3. I do enjoy taking notes with a pen and paper if I am in some meetings or listening to a lecture. In Evernote, I can either type those out or just quickly take a photo of my notes. Evernote instantly saves them to a pdf so they are easy for me to access. 

I feel that Evernote is the answer to these little papers that can hang around. We all have notes or paperwork that we don’t want to throw away because we may need to access them. Or maybe we know that we will need easy access to them in the future. Evernote keeps them all in one place.

Another feature I love is that it’s easy to share a document. I mentioned above that my husband and I sit down every fall and talk about our goals for the next year. My husband also has an Evernote account, so we can share this document we create. We both have access to it and we can both edit it as we need to. 

I do want to add… I do not keep sensitive information here (information with social security numbers or bank account information.) I keep that on my remote hard drive with other important documents. Evernote is a web-based program, so I don’t feel that it is as secure as I would like for that information. However, it is perfect for all of the random things we have to keep up with. 

Evernote is free. I am in no way paid to tell you how great I think it is. I do encourage you to try it! I have found that it’s a wonderful way to keep up with all the things while remaining organized and free of paper clutter!

Final note: I have a small scanner that is great for photos or small files. You can purchase that HERE. Evernote also allows you to just snap photos from the Evernote app.

I hope these simple steps to a clutter and paper free life are adding to your goodness margin!