Cool Tool

Thanks to fellow Tenner author Erin Bow, I now have a new favorite gizmo: Evernote. Evernote is a free tool you download; it syncs up with your web browser and lets you organize various things for research—web pages, notes, clippings, photos, video and audio. You put your stuff in online “notebooks” and you can review your stuff visually. I’m not a fan of bookmarks so I have a very unorthodox and, ultimately, ineffective method of flagging sites that I’ll need for research. Plus, I’m constantly using up paper and ink printing out random things that I think I’ll never be able to find again on the web. Then I lose the paper. Brilliant.

Once you download Evernote and get an account (this took two minutes) you just paste things into it. And because it is web-based, Evernote is accessible from any computer or mobile device; log on anywhere and see all the stuff in your notebooks. Even when you're offline you can access your notebooks because Evernote saves your web pages, clippings, etc. locally to the hard drive where you set up your original account.

If, like me, you’re not a linear organizer (i.e. the palm of my hand always has various notes scribbled on it) definitely check it out. It seems to work exactly how I wanted it to work, which is always a good sign. I need to find tools I can use intuitively; if I have to learn how to use something then I know at some point I will unlearn it. And I hate that.

Evernote forever! (Or until Scrivener stops being such a Mac elitist and comes out with a PC version.)