Visualisation of evernote — How I see it in a world without internet!

Despite the fact that we live in a digital era, still paper exists strongly in our lives in almost all of our daily activities. In whatever action we do there is a paper to confirm it, prove it or remind it.

Try to think what you do daily, you keep notes for your projects, you organise your day, you put reminders in post-it, you receive the electricity bill, you buy tickets for the theatre or for the metro, you receive payment receipts from the super market, you print or write down food recipes that seem tasty.

Before I start describing how I visualise evernote I would like you to imagine a world without computers and without internet. Back to 1970. I know it’s scary, but I would like to show you how we would organise ourselves in such a case and what exact actions or things are made today by evernote.

Let’s imagine that it’s a Friday night and we are back home from a very busy day. We look around in our apartment and is full of papers. Bills, love letters, business notes from last week, lists with to-do’s, a letter from the bank and some invoices from week’s purchases.

It’s not finished yet. We leave down our handbag and we open it. Also the bag full of papers. Some new contracts, letters from clients, meeting notes from last week, a sales report for the last month. We take all these papers out and we put them next to the papers that we found around the house.

I know! You are stressed already. Now relax, make a hot coffee and go to your nice office. Before you do so, take one moment and collect all the papers from around the house in one pile. No matter which is after which. Put them all randomly in a pile and leave this pile on your desktop. This pile is the .inbox notebook of your evernote. There is where you put all incoming stuff to be processed later. All these papers are all your notes.

Now visualise a very nice classic bookshelf across your desk. Visualise it empty. This bookshelf is your evernote.

Now go to your bookshelf and put a sticker with a name to every shelf. For example name the first shelf “Personal”, name the second shelf “Business”, name the 3rd shelf “Archive”.

The shelves of your bookshelf are your evernote note-stacks.

See? You are starting to feel more relaxed.

Now visualise another pile of brand new paper folders. They smell brand new. Unused and untouched. These folders are going to be your evernote notebooks.

Now go to the pile with your papers (notes) and take the first paper on the top of the pile. Let’s suppose that it is the ticket for your vacation in Paris next week that you received by post.

Take a new folder (notebook) and write on it “holidays” and put the ticket in it. Close the folder and put it on the “personal” shelf

You just created the first note in your evernote, you put it in the notebook “holidays” that is under the notes-stack “personal”

Do this for the rest of your notes until you finish with the pile. Take the papers one by one, create new or use already used folders, fill them with notes and place the folders in the right shelf. You already feel so organised.

But where are the tags?

Imagine that when you reached in the middle of your papers pile, you found the hand-notes that you made yesterday with what to visit in Paris. Go to your bookshelf, in the “personal” shelf, take out your “holidays” folder and pin with a clip this hand-note with your tickets to Paris that you put in this folder before. Pin also on top a small piece of paper, writing“Paris, 1970” on it. This piece of paper is your tags “Paris” and “1970".

Do the same for all your notes. For example: Pin all your notes related to project x, with a small paper that writes project_x (the tag), put the notes in the folder named “projects” (the notebook) and put the whole folder in the shelf named “business” (The stack). Finally put the folder in your bookshelf (evernote).

I can feel the stress on your eyes reaching in this point so I will wake you up telling you that we are back to the evernote world. Paperless and most important, with our bookshelf always with us.

How do you visualise evernote?

Originally published at www.webcompass.ro on October 20, 2014.