5 Tips for a More Productive Evernote Experience

More of us are starting to use Evernote to store and organize the massive amounts of information in our lives. I use the application just about every day. Right now, I’m composing a draft of this post in my “blog post ideas” folder. It saves as I type and syncs across my computer, tablet, smartphone, and browser. No more lost data!

The user interface is intuitive, but here are a few tips I’ve discovered along the way that make the experience even more productive:

1. Clip only portions of web pages – Firefox and Chrome’s extensions are great for clipping content from across the web right into Evernote. But you may be interested in only a portion of the page. To do so, simply highlight the portion you want and click on the “Clip Selection” option.

2. Encrypt sensitive information – I probably won’t need to encrypt blog post ideas, but information such as logins or financial data could be accessible to anyone using my computer so I encrypt it. To do so, highlight the sensitive text, then right click (control + click on a Mac), and choose “Encrypt Selected Text”. Choose a password, or passphrase as Evernote calls it and hit enter. An option to select a password recovery hint appears. I’d include a hint as Evernote does not store your password. The text you selected is now encrypted and shows up as dots with a down arrow for entering a password to access your information.

3. Streamline the dashboard – I like to keep a minimalist dashboard for a quick view and easy use. Among the columns you can view at a glance are: Author, Created, Notebook, Size, Sync Status, Title and Updated. I’ve unchecked all but Created, Title and Updated. It’s all I need.

4. Quickly share your notebooks by connecting to Gmail – Evernote allows you to share notes with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and email. I don’t have any use for sharing an entire note or notebook on social media, but I do use the email-to-share feature often. Now you can connect Evernote to your Gmail account. It makes the process of sharing notes with friends, coworkers and classmates much faster as the connection will quickly autocomplete the address.

5. Use the voice recording feature – This feature is handy when you’re on the road and need to drop a thought into Evernote but don’t have the time to type. I’ve used my iPhone Evernote app many times for this, even for blog post ideas, and occasionally for dictating an entire post.

These are just a few of the many productivity tips that can enhance your use of Evernote. Please share yours in the comments below.