When I first started using Evernote a few years ago, I certainly wasn't using it to its full potential. After playing around with it more though, I believe it's the most important organizational tool I use for my business now.

At first, I would just save recipes I liked or random ideas I'd find online -- turning Evernote into a hodgepodge of things without any real system in place. But then I got serious about my organization and spent some time figuring out what I really needed out of it.

I have plenty of notebooks in Evernote that are relevant to my interests or personal life, but the part I'll share with you is how I've used Evernote to transform my business and ability to be an effective/efficient entrepreneur. I'm building a part-time private practice as a professional counselor, which means there are lots of behind-the-scenes things I have to learn and do in order to be successful. So, here's the 2 things specific to my business' organization:

I have one notebook "stack" (stack = collection of notebooks) titled Career. Within that, I have several notebooks. Here are just a few of them:

• Associations
• Web Design
• Email Templates
• Counseling Docs/Resources
• Ideas/Inspiration
• Legal
• Marketing/Networking
• Office Management Tools
• Praise/Feedback
• Referrals
• Theories/Techniques

For each of these notebooks, I will use the web clipper to save any and everything that applies. For example, I'm not very familiar with Adwords, but feel like I need to learn more about it. So whenever I google it, I use the web clipper to send any relevant sites into my Marketing/Networking notebook (remember, that notebook is within the stack called Career).

For my Referrals notebook, I use the web clipper to save email interactions with the professional contacts I've made. Another really great way I've used this notebook is when receiving people's business cards.

During a meetup recently, I got about 7 business cards from other counselors. Instead of just shoving it away in a folder in my office, I first took pictures of each person's card (using Evernote's camera feature) so that I could create a specific note for each person. And I made extra comments to help me remember particular things about them. So for example: Let's say I met Sally Sue on Jan 13, 2015 and she specializes in Trauma, and I learned that she also has a son in middle school... well... I would title the specific note "Sally Sue 1/13/15 Meet Up", have the picture of her card (the side showing the contact info), then would write specific notes like, "Specialty: Trauma; Doesn't accept insurance; Evening hours; Has son in middle school; (and maybe I'd add a physical description of her to help jog my memory)." Voila!

So this Career stack is the place where I keep up with important resources, info, or inspiration.

However, the next part of my system -- and this has become the most important part because it makes me actually USE all this information I'm storing on Evernote -- is my stack called "Turn Pro" (This is just my own personal nod to the book by Steven Pressfield since it's inspired me to be more focused).

The Career stack has all the stuff, and this Turn Pro stack has all the "do". After reviewing all the different things I needed to do to be successful in my business, I developed specific categories that addressed everything. These categories then became the notebooks in the Turn Pro stack:

• Advertising/SEO/Marketing
• Client Work
• Logistics/Maintenance
• Networking/Referrals
• New Ventures
• Professional Development/Hone My Craft
• Social Media
• Write/Create Content
  
  

Within each of these notebooks, I have a note titled "Running List". This is where I write any ideas or specific tasks I know I need to do for that category/notebook. This gets updated any time something pops in my head. By knowing I have this running list available in every notebook, it helps me not feel compelled to distract myself with every task that pops in my head, since I can trust that I'll get to it eventually.

But how does this all connect to that first Career stack I mentioned? Well, say I'm working on Marketing that day (from the Turn Pro stack). I first go check my "Running List' to see what I need to do. One of the tasks will inevitably be to learn about Adwords. At this point, I could go google about it and fall into a hole of information. OR... I could use that Marketing/Networking notebook from the Career stack to remind myself of the websites I've already clipped/saved about Adwords. So that's what I'd do. I'd review whatever information I already saved for myself from the Career stack, then I'd start working on it. Obviously if I hadn't ever looked it up before, then I would go and google it, but I'd be sure to clip whatever sites I found useful.

So basically, the Turn Pro stack contains the to-do list, while the Career stack contains more of the resources, and they work together seamlessly. (Be aware though that the Career and Turn Pro stacks don't contain the same notebooks -- they each have their own personalities and uses, but there is some overlap, indeed).

Going back to the Turn Pro stack, each notebook in there doesn't necessarily only contain that one note of "Running List". I'll give you an example from the Client Work notebook to explain this. So, first, I have the Running List (which is always my first point of contact in the notebook since it tells me my to-do list for that category), and on that list, it will have the ongoing task of reviewing my caseload and preparing myself for my next session with each client. So what I've done is, within that Client Work notebook, I create a note for each of my clients (using a code name so that it stays confidential). And within each client's note, I write in some things I want to try, some questions I may have, or I may even add some resources that'd be useful for the client.

For example, I was reading a book the other day and read a passage that seemed relevant to my client, so I took a picture with my phone of the passage and added it to that client's note. Another cool thing I've done is, when I'm not on my computer and can only use my phone, I'll leave myself voice notes so that I can avoid typing lots of stuff on my phone. So for some clients, I've got typed out ideas, images, and even voice recordings -- all contained within Evernote, never once needing to leave the program in order to bring it all together. I can't stress how useful this has been for keeping everything in one place instead of having scattered lists everywhere! So for the Client Work notebook, I will have many notes: 1 called Running List, and 1 for each client I'm seeing.

Time Management

The 3rd piece of all of this (I said there was only 2, but I guess I lied), is that my Turn Pro stack is used in conjunction with my calendar (google calendar). I don't mean to imply they are digitally synced in any way though. How it works is this: Whenever I spent time early on brainstorming the business categories that I needed to focus on to build my business, the categories I came up with turned into 2 things:

1. they became the names for the notebooks in the Turn Pro stack
2. they became blocks of time in my calendar

I was lacking a lot of structure, so I got serious and spent time planning out my daily schedule (I work part time in the mornings as a teacher, so I knew I had to use my afternoons to not only see clients, but to also address every category in my business). Eventually, I came up with a good weekly schedule that gave me the time to work on everything I need to. I even gave my self specific time frames for each task. As an example, here's what my Thursday looks like on my schedule:

• 8:30a - 12:30p: teaching
• 1 - 3: professional development
• 3 - 4:30: client work
• 4:30 - 5:30: logistics/maintenance
• 5:30 - 6:30: new ventures

Now obviously I have to take breaks to eat, use the restroom, or maybe I'm seeing a client in the middle of the afternoon, but it's not so much the specific time of day that I do that task that matters -- it's more about ensuring I spend the appropriate duration of time available for the task. Depending on the category, that duration of time can be cut short though. For example, if there isn't much I need to worry about in the Logistics/Maintenance category that week, it's OK if it only takes me 20 minutes. However, if it's something like Networking... or Writing (the 2 things I dread), it's important that I spend the whole time allotted for it, that way I hold myself accountable. Anytime I start working on a new category, I set the timer on my phone so that I know I have to focus intensely until I hear the timer go off.

It's really important to always give yourself the most time to do the things you have to do -- even if it's not the thing you want to do. Most Important Task first. Always. I love to do administrative tasks, like checking emails and filling out spreadsheets... but that's not what will bring me new clients, so I know that I have to focus on marketing and networking more (despite my hatred of it).

I've certainly been more productive and focused since implementing this system. And funny enough, I'm finding myself with more spare time to do things I enjoy. Before getting organized, I would procrastinate and feel guilty for not doing enough... so I'd be a sloth. Now that I know I have limited time to do certain tasks though, I have laser focus and therefore feel at ease when I can shut down my computer and go out and actually enjoy my life!

I know that was a lot of info... but hopefully it was useful (and made sense). Thanks for the question.

There are lots of great answers on this thread. Let me start by saying that I love Evernote, find it extremely useful, and I've been a premium subscriber since 2008. However, there is a lot of room for improvement, and I truly hope they use some of the $20 Million in funding they raised to address some of the most important issues, especially as the service grows ever more popular.

First of all, Evernote UIs are not great across the board. They're pretty ugly, and their usability is poor as well. When Evernote for iPad first shipped, it was like a breath of fresh air. Then I heard Evernote CEO Phil Libin mention in a podcast that it was the first time that they actually hired an interface designer to put together the UI for one of their clients. It shows. Now they need to do this for all of their clients, including the web version.

Not that the iPad version is perfect - it still needs work too. Things like a list view instead of the cartoony notebook and tag views would greatly enhance usability. The iPhone version is particularly bad. Given the rapid pace of development on iOS, and the truly stunning UIs now available in a plethora of apps from shops of all sizes, Evernote feels like it hasn't evolved much, and needs a complete overhaul. This is apparently underway, so I'm willing to give Evernote the benefit of the doubt for a few more months. But when iPhone apps dedicated to inputting text and images into Evernote spring up alongside the official app because the user experience is so poor, you know you have problems.

Evernote excels at getting content into the system, it does less well at retrieval. Case in point is tag management - it's awful. Evernote has about the worst implementation of tags I've seen in any application. The behavior is strange (try moving them around in the Mac client), the tags are not truly hierarchical (children don't inherit parent attributes), and there is no tag cloud (something that would be extremely helpful now that I have thousands of notes), and there is no ability to search or jump to a letter when assigning tags in iOS. Powerful search capabilities exist, but are poorly documented for the end user. "Saved Searches" should be renamed "Smart Folders" to make it clearer to users what they are actually for.

Until recently, Evernote insisted on a flat list of notebooks, suggesting that users build tag hierarchies instead. There were a lot of issues with this approach, and users continued to demand folders for notebooks. In late 2010, Evernote finally relented and now includes "Notebook Stacks" in the Mac and Windows clients. This was good progress, but they only allow one layer of hierarchy. It would be better to allow as many layers as the end user needs. For better or worse, most folks still to this day are comfortable with the folder metaphor as a way of structuring their information.

One thing that always frustrates me about Evernote is their poor security. They consistently claim that there is no reason to have a lock code for any of their apps, including mobile ones. Evernote's management insists that the OS level protection on your device is sufficient. This is just wrong, and PIN codes for the iPhone and Android apps have consistently been demanded by users. Evernote is completely tone deaf on this point. With devices like the iPhone and iPad becoming increasingly more social, it is natural to want to pass around a phone or tablet to let kids play games, or to let friends surf the web. We need that second level of protection at that point - an OS level PIN code does nothing. Evernote's motto is "Remember everything" encouraging users to use the platform to store everything of importance to them. Yet they show a distinct unwillingness to help users protect their content, something I find distressing. Tons of applications offer this functionality - from document readers to simple text editors. It couldn't take much in development to implement a PIN code, I find it absolutely baffling why Evernote insists that users don't need it.

It only takes a little while of using Evernote to bump up against its limitations and annoyances. I've considered leaving several times, but in the end the rock solid syncing keeps me on the platform. My one hope is that rather than trying to develop so many different partnerships, Evernote will really focus on improving its core offering, and make it the best it can be. Things like the Livescribe partnership were introduced with great fanfare, yet is poorly implemented and has not been much improved since launch. Meanwhile, maddeningly basic text formatting issues persist in the Mac client.

Evernote has tremendous promise, and a rapidly growing rate of adoption. They need to be able to scale and adapt at the same time, which is certainly a challenge. I think Evernote's growth will inevitably help fuel their development, and I look forward to seeing what they will achieve in 2011.

The better question is what do I NOT use Evernote for at this point! Evernote has increased my productivity x10 and I don’t even know most hacks with it. But how do I use Evernote?

The first way I use Evernote is by hooking up my Evernote email (which can be found by going to your settings and then scrolling down) to all the newsletters that I really want to follow and read. This helps clean out my inbox for more important emails from clients and such.

I also use Evernote as an alternative to Pocket. I love Pocket but I don’t like having so many applications to manage. I try to keep my life as simple as possible and saving all articles I want to save for later via Evernote allows me to do just that.

The other way I use Evernote is as a personal journal for my thoughts. I meditate via breathing exercises daily but sometimes I have so much on my mind that I need to rant. So instead of annoying and wasting someone else's time and energy I unleash all my thoughts via a private Evernote notebook. This helps me have a clear mind at all times and destress.

I use Evernote as a way to write out all my rough drafts of blog posts, some Quora posts, and proposals for potential clients. Again keeping everything under one roof seems to keep my life very simple.

Pseudo code. Yeah that’s right I sometimes use Evernote to write out all the steps that I will take to create a project/app. This helps me visualize situations and the application much more efficiently. I find that writing out my project/application in plan english reduces the amount of bugs and headaches I have when I start coding.

Daily Planner & Reminders. Evernote is also the one of two main ways that I organize my personal life and daily tasks.

Evernote’s new CEO and his leadership team are attempting to better focus the efforts of the company. He’s explicit stated this means focusing on the editing experience, sync and search. When you focus that means things necessarily get left out. Yes, this is normal for a company refocusing on value and not features. No, there isn’t a roadmap in a market with such heavy competition.

Evernote's CEO on 'unlocking the potential of every idea'

Evernote’s competitive advantage is it’s flexibility of capture and speed of retrieval to address the challenges of information overload. For the foreseeable future expect them to double down on this and make it more accessible to the uninitiated user so they gain more loyal rather than casual users. That will likely mean improvements in the ability to capture and then search for information. Organizing information, related information and new features unrelated to core will likely take a serious back seat.

Conquer your information overload with Evernote [Infographic] | TaskClone

Once they’ve maximized their core value proposition (which they haven’t), they’ll continue to try to capture more of that value monetarily through marketing to attract more users and raising prices. It’s then that I expect more features to help support raising prices.

What Evernote is missing really depends on how you're using it. I mostly use Evernote as digital filing cabinet for a (nearly) paperless life. In this use case my largest gripe with Evernote is the lack of any structured data. I'd love to be able to add a price field to my receipts notebook or presenter and conference fields to my presentations notebook. Tags and hacking around with naming conventions only get one so far. For similar reasons it would be great to have per notebook settings for sort order and display.

Beyond the use case described above I think Evernote is missing a massive opportunity by not opening up user's public notes to browsing and search. I think they have the opportunity to outdo services such as Pinterest if they were to execute the idea well.

What gives you the impression that it is? It seems to be struggling along with its around 200 MILLION users, making a modest profit and still having a goodly chunk of investment cash ready for action.

There are (IMHO) currently no competitors that do everything that Evernote does only better - all of the options require some feature compromise, although some offer alternatives that Evernote currently does not. They do not have similar size or the stability.

Evernote are still dynamically developing their various products for desktop and mobile devices, with updates for new features appearing every 2–3 months.

They seem to have a long term plan (which they don’t discuss) to bring all of their applications in line, providing the same features regardless of OS - which when you consider the wildly different devices and screen sizes they support, is quite some task.

A large and extremely active sector of the user base demand all sorts of additional features from dark themes to variable sync options - and complain loudly when a new feature comes out that isn’t theirs.

Evernote isn’t short of ideas to keep its developers busy for the next few years - and the active and passionate groups of users indicate that whatever shortfalls are perceived in its current feature list, Evernote is used by a lot of loyal and committed people.

It depends what you want to use it for…

As a personal Farleyfile to record details of who you meet, what you buy, where you go, what you eat, what medicines you take, what lectures you attend.. as well as planning for all those things, and lots more.. Evernote has no equal. Small businesses can extend that to customer records, business invoices and receipts, and social media marketing. There’s lots online about what Evernote can do. It has a killer search function, and works on more or less any device you can pick up.

But.

Evernote has no calendar as such - it understands dates, but you can’t see a standard calendar layout for your next month’s activities; it doesn’t store pictures very well - there’s no layout or gallery; if you and 10 colleagues want to collaborate on project notes - don’t use Evernote: it doesn’t handle more than one or (maybe) two people in a note at any one time very well.

It doesn’t do alarms much either - a very discreet pop-up will (if you see it) remind you of an event as a one-off. There are no repeats, and if you want the same reminder two days running, you have to reset it yourself after the first one.

And Evernote has a very basic editor. It’s fine for email-style notes, with tables, bullets, indents and paragraph numbering; but try to embed a picture and things get shuffled around. Better to use a ‘proper’ word processor and attach the file to your Evernote note.

Like I said. Where Evernote is good, it’s very VERY good. The bad points depend entirely on what you expect from it. One good point is that it’s free - so go download the desktop version and try out your preferred use case. See what you think.

Bear in mind that Evernote is (IMHO) the best mix of features available. Other apps distinguish themselves by being better at some things - OneNote kills at note layout forinstance. But beware that against that there will be serious downsides in other areas.

Try stuff out and see what you think!

A few improvements come to mind:

• To do lists. This would be key. I don't have an implementation in mind, but I'll leave it to geniuses at Evernote to figure this out. I am a new premium user of Evernote and the more I use it, the more I love it, the more stuff I store in it, the more I love it and the cycle continues. I currently use Asana for my To Do list, but it would be great to just port everything to Evernote and use it to manage my life. By the way, in December 2011, the CEO of Evernote Phil Libin told Business Insider that to do lists are coming (source; http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-08/tech/30491806_1_new-apps-phil-libin-lists). I am very excited about this.
• Skitch integration: ability to annotate image directly from a note. Currently, to annotate and image and store it in Evernote, I would need to go through this flow: take a screenshot --> open Skitch --> copy it into Skitch --> annotate --> save to desktop --> copy into an Evernote note. It's too long and cumbersome. 99% of the time, I end up using Preview to annotate the screenshot. Now, if Evernote integrated Skitch in a way where I could actually annotate the image after pasting it into a note, that would be amazing. It would save me so much time, remove barriers so I would actually save and annotate at a higher rate than I do now and overall lock me into Evernote even more. I would probably even pay a higher monthly premium to Evernote for this. By $1.
• Build out Hello app / contact management with more features and integrations: I recently started using the Hello iPhone app to remember people I meet (mostly for business-related networking purposes). I find that it's a great solution that I've been looking for, but it's still a pretty new product. These improvements would be great: (1) ability to edit the date, time and location of the encounter would be great. I find that I always enter notes about the person after the meeting, so the date/location/time is always off. (2) sync to Google Contacts and Gmail. Currently, Hello asks me to enter the contact info for this person. That's not really a needed feature because I probably have their contact info because I most likely set up that meeting by email. I want to use Hello to remember specific personal notes about this person and have it automatically tap into Google Contacts for supplementary information.
• A way to capture screenshots of emails in Gmail. I often capture emails that other companies send as examples of great email design. Usually the workflow for this is very slow: save email on desktop --> put into Dropbox Public folder ---> copy public link --> open in Chrome --> take screenshot of the entire page with the Awesome Screenshot Chrome extension --> put into a note in Evernote. I know that Evernote has the Clip to Evernote Chrome extension, but I would only like to capture a screenshot, not more than that. So it would be helpful if Evernote added a "take screenshot of entire page" functionality to the Clip to Evernote extension.
• Note links: make note links clickable and linkable not only from the Evernote desktop apps, but from web apps like Google Spreadsheets.
• Make Hello notes editable in Evernote desktop app: this would be very useful. I meet people and take notes about them on the go, but soon after I get to my computer and want to add even more notes (and I'm a faster typer on computer than iPhone). It would be great to be able to supplement the notes from Hello in the Evernote desktop app.

Evernote is a solid product. It has also spent a lot of time on building up relationships. Just like Dropbox it is independent. Both packages got a good start and have had to fight off stiff competition from Microsoft, Google etc.

It’s not dying but it does need to look at some ways to make the software more flexible. I have moved away from using it for anything apart from being the notebooks they are.

A better directory like structure would help. I prefer folders to tags, but folders are harder to relate in code than tags. With this limitation I can make it do the notebook thing very well but it would never be the truly structure tool like Treepad is. The upside is that you can access Evernote from anything and it uses cloud in the true way.

Timing

Evernote was one of the few mobile apps released on the early days of App stores. With the promise of new era of apps and limited choice of said ground-breaking era, it makes sense for users to flock and try out Evernote.

Word of Mouth

Nerds (especially me) loves to talk about how passionate we are in using such useful product. Consequently, these fans will sell Evernote to other closest early adopters (in which more likely to enjoy using Evernote). After that, those adopters tell another bunch, and the cycle go on. It’s freemium model also helps to zeroed in the acquisition cost

It’s always about being a great product

When it’s starting, no other app can do what Evernote can: Annotate the whole web, impressive UX, Search, Sync, and many others. They also keep innovating when they need to.

Now? They have partnered with Moleskine, created Penultimate, Skitch, and others

Source

Footnotes

One mans garbage is another mans treasure.

I don't mind it at all, very little of what I do is via the web interface. But for all the pretty apps they have for all of the different devices, they make those using the tools available to them. iPad, iPhone, Android, WP7, etc. are all specific, individual "ecosystems" (for a lack of a better term). Meaning, you're designing it for a few select devices with a specific OS.

Where as the web version has to work with multiple OSs, multiple hardware devices, and more importantly multiple browsers.

It's like a single purpose tool versus a multi-tool, multi-tools "rarely" win design awards.

Different Note Types:

In current version, Evernote just add notes. If you want to storage an image, you should first create note and than import an image. However, Evernote let us to add just an image, link or spreadsheet.

e.g.
Add Note...
Add Image...
Add Spreadsheet...

Functional Tab Key:

Tab key is generally used to advance the cursor to the next tab stop. However, in Evernote, tab stops of different lanes are not same. If I press tab key in different lines, following characters starts with different places.

Image Editing:

Currently, it is not possible to resize, crop, rotate the images added in note. Evernote may add these features.

Better Table Editing:

Tables have quite basic structure and not too many option to customize. It can be good if they increase the customization such as border thickness etc.

It's quite funny that most of the Windows users of Evernote think that the iOS users have the cool stuff.. while most of the iOS users complain that Windows always gets the good stuff first. Since these are two different operating systems being serviced by two separate development teams it's not surprising that some features are far easier to implement in one OS than the other - and when one team finds a good feature update, the other has to find out "can we do that at all?" and then develop the code in their language. (Not to mention the millions of users and dozens of countries that Evernote services.) The Windows GUI changed quite dramatically from Evernote v 4.x to 5.x, and those complaints are only just dying down. Given the development cycle it's possible that more is on the way - but Evernote are famous for not announcing change until it's here, so if anyone tells you they known when: they're wrong.

There are some positives and negatives to how Evernote is doing this year so far. First of all, one of the huge positives for the company is that they’re officially cash-flow positive and their CEO even wound up saying that they won’t need to take in any more VC funding because they’ll be able to fund their own endeavors with their operating cash. This is great because it shows that the company is relatively self-sustainable and they wouldn’t need VC funding to expand their business going forward.

Ultimately however, I think Evernote still operates within a very niche market and they’re not making any monumental changes to their business model. Some of the most notable changes are small changes to their revenue streams (they increased the price of premium) and their features (the speed is faster with Google’s Cloud Platform). However, all of this is within the realm of note-taking and productivity which is a relatively small market without much room to grow.

If Evernote wants to continue being successful down the line, I think they seriously need to think about where their business will go and how it can expand into other territories to make it a more competitive, all-inclusive tool for users. While it seems like the price changes and some layoffs have contributed to their positive cash flow, they won’t be able to sustain this unless they make some large changes or improvements to the overall business model.

I truly hope that Evernote will focus on its core offering, and improve that before spending time developing more partnerships. There are real gaps in functionality, and some serious issues (text formatting on mac, sub-par iPhone app) that need to be addressed before they push into other areas.

Their much hyped partnership with Livescribe is pretty limited, not well implemented, and has yet to be improved several months after launch. Before starting other partnerships, they should improve that one, which is pretty important for their platform.

I worry about Evernote getting too scattered and not focusing on the really important platforms - Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android. Rather than trying to support every device on the planet and partner with hundreds of different companies, they should address those five platforms and make sure they're rock solid on core functionality before doing anything else.

I actually use Nimbus web clipper, which I think is more modern and provides a lot more features. You can clip only a fragment, full page or only the article. Edit it if you need and save it in your computer or directly in your notes in nimbus.

With Office 365 revenue at $25 billion alone, it is hard to argue that productivity software is a small market. Any organization with employees (i.e. any organization) is willing to spend on technology to improve the productivity of its team. Wages and salaries in the US alone are $6 trillion. Even if organizations were willing to spend just 1% of this on improving the productivity of those folks, it would be a $60 billion market.

Evernote could grow a lot by focusing on vertical market solutions (e.g. sales) and going “up market” with more enterprise features. This pricing teardown gives a lot more ideas: Tearing Down Evernote's Pricing