Unlock the magic of Evernote (with Stacey Harmon)

i'm here with stacey she has this amazing definition of herself in her website it starts like this i'm stacy and i love every note that's so nice it's pretty true she's also a productivity coach and a certified evernote uh consultant like me thank you stacy for accepting my invitation today i'm thrilled to be here thanks for the invitation okay i know that you have this step-by-step to master evernote can we start what's the step number one the truth is evernote is a very deep and and powerful platform and there's a lot of paths to really

embracing evernote but i think that there's a couple of steps that people who are just casually using evernote or using it just to collect things can really embrace to up level their productivity really maximize the platform and um falls into five categories so the first one is that i really think people misunderstand and don't fully appreciate the power of evernote search okay why you say that okay so the reason i say that is because the most common question i get and you probably get it too is how do i organize evernote for whatever right everybody

wants to know the truth is evernote can organize any of it it doesn't you know you can design a workflow to organize anything but and it's an important question but i also think it's not quite the right question because when we're talking about how to organize evernote people don't understand that search actually in my perspective strongly inter influences how you organize evernote when you are trying to organize evernote and you're struggling to organize evernote it's because it what i've observed in my years of doing this is you're struggling to take these traditional offline organizing principles

which are around like grouping like things right like creating groupings of things so think about the grocery store and the produce section yeah you know where the onions are right and the potatoes you know that's all going to be kind of grouped together that's an organizing strategy and it works great it's efficient but it's doesn't always translate it's not the first thing that translates to a digital environment or a cloud computing environment like evernote because search is a game changer i totally agree with you i actually in my view evernote is a type of search

engine it's just a search engine on your own stuff and the truth is that search influences number one how i find things which is really what you want when you're asking me how do i organize evernote you're asking me how do i find what i'm looking for when i need it and so the first tool that i rely on to do that most often is search yeah i i usually ask the person what do you want to find instead of how can i organize it i always ask how what do you want to find i

guess that's that's that's what you're trying to say yeah exactly we're totally aligned in this and so the um and the truth is evernote's industry-leading in terms of search it's a core element of something they constantly evolve and so the fact that people miss the importance of this really speaks to how organized you and fluent you are with evernote so when you stop trying to figure out how to organize and you start to understand how deeply you can search and how search works you can then start to use the evernote tools to set your up

what i call set yourself up for search success which allows you to deploy the features of evernote notebooks stacks tags naming conventions shortcuts save searches you know all these kinds of things to help you in essence organize evernote because they help you to find what you're looking for but it all starts with search and understanding that number one evernote indexes everything you put into it like so you're not saying that we don't need a notebook or no i'm not saying that at all i'm saying it's not the right place to start with i'm saying the

notebook that you choose and the naming convention and the way you organize that is going to be impacted when you understand how search works because what you're going to do is you're going to configure that notebook and all the notes in it to um set yourself up for search success so it's going to provide a visual human brain-friendly element over there on your sidebar it's going to produce that that produce grouping that we have at the grocery store right where it's like okay your brain can go right there for key things but it's going to

be influenced based on search um and how search works um so that's a concept that a lot of people miss entirely and here's an analogy and i wrote a whole blog post about this so people can go deeper with it if this if this idea interests them but like think about it in a digital world we all know google we all know that google retrieves our stuff fast is google organizing the internet not not the way people think they are retrieving it they're searching finding it like we conceptually get that so if and we trust

google and we know we can find what we need with google so we don't ask google to organize the internet for us we ask google to search and find and retrieve and when you get that you can do that and rely on evernote in the same way it changes how you organize so for example let's talk about the classic debate notebooks versus tags right yes let's get right into it okay like in when you understand search you understand that evernote's indexing everything that goes into it and i i know people are going to gloss over

the everything word so we can get into some specifics but the truth is your entire note anything that's in the note whether it's the interior contents of a pdf of a document a word document an excel document the handwriting that you put into a picture all of that is retrieved by search or index by search like all those things are tagged in essence they're already in the note so if you're spending time attempting to organize by tags you're being redundant you're doing extra work feel free to do extra videos but i don't want to do

extra work why would i why would i add tags to a note that already has all those keywords in it right when evernote's indexing and finding it so it's really quite magical how search works and people need to comprehend that because that then influences so how i organize everything when when we should we create a notebook when should we use tags if everything is searchable for example my wife she has a single notebook and she searches for everything but when should we create a notebook and tags in our opinion when you feel like you're it

would be more efficient yeah i agree so let's just answer it like a little less a little more specific like if you have a low note count one notebook's fine in search and there comes a point where it's more it's most efficient for me to create some structure around some common use cases for me right some common use cases so i've created and i build out and i do rely on those elements it's just my point is they're completely influenced by my understanding of search because search is my go-to kind of um skill set with

evernote and the way that i retrieve and find what i'm looking for even with 30 000 notes i like to use the analogy of like a video game when we have lives and energy up energy bar so i like to think that if i'm expending too much energy searching it's a good idea to have a notebook and vice versa if i'm spending too much time organizing instead of searching i'm expanding energy my lives in the video game and so it's it's better to search so i like this energy and knowledge because in the end it's

energy we're spending time right we're spending our our life organizing or searching or finding looking for i love that i think that's great and it gets around the challenge of like where where's the threshold like that's what you're saying is it's actually an energetic and time threshold it's not a note count threshold it's not that kind of thing you could have 10 notes and search might be your best bet except for the fact that one of them is your errands list and you're referring to that all the time so why do you have to search

for it every time when you can just shortcut that and have it accessible on all your devices from your home or from it at home right we have new options now so they're just discovery options all of those are discovery options and um that's why i really encourage people to focus on search skills versus organizational skills if they're struggling to organize everything i like the analogy you told me once about a house when you move to a house you have the boxes can you tell us that one work yeah so the way that i like

to explain what search does is like let's assume you're moving and you pack up all your stuff into a cardboard boxes and you move into this new house that has this magic feature and that feature is every time you bring something through a threshold the door or window it's got this magic it looks at everything that's in the box and it categorizes and indexes and tracks where you put that into the house so let's just say you've had a long day of unpacking you brought all this stuff into the house you sit down you want

to pop open a bottle of wine and relax and you're like i need a corkscrew here's my corkscrew and the house goes gracie your corkscrew's here in the it's in that box that's in your bedroom and didn't get post put in the kitchen and then what it does though is it like beams you right to the corkscrew so you can open up that box and get your corkscrew okay super cool it but it's beyond that it like also will say wait stacy you have four corkscrews which corkscrew do you want right and it'll ask you

what you want and then you can pick it and it'll beam you right there okay in essence this is what evernote does um and even beyond like beaming me to that location if i then realize oh my gosh my corkscrew should not be in my bedroom it should be in the kitchen okay i'm gonna carry it downstairs and put it in the kitchen in the drawer evernote's gonna track that the house is gonna track that and it's gonna know that it's in this new location it's gonna take me there next time i go to search

for it okay so this is exactly how evernote works it's a magic house anytime something crosses into your evernote account and that's anything these boxes contain all kinds of materials in evernote term they contain text forwarding in emails site websites that you clip into evernote pdfs that you put in images that you put in if you're paying subscriber um any word docs pages documents any of the major you know document platforms that you store in evernote if evernote if it's digital and you put it in evernote evernote now i want now i want this evernote

house [Laughter] you know i trust evernote to find what i'm looking for and it's a key reason to pay evernote so that everything you put into there is indexed right the free level has some of the handwriting capability in images but if you want it to index the interior contents of say your pdfs and your um your other documents that you use in your life uh that's a reason to be a become a ping pong yes and talking about capturing things step number two what it is yeah okay so then like obviously all this stuff's

coming into our house right understand the power of that you want to put more things in your house and um so the next step to really mastering and making evernote magical for you is around um getting more stuff in there right and i like to reference there's a concept whether you embrace gtd get david allen's getting things done philosophy or not he has a construct in there that applies to anything and that is that there's stages for mastering workflow so if you look at what we we actually go through to accomplish things it's a five-step

process capture clarify organize review and engage okay so having said that what's the very first one capture right so no matter what we do you have an idea you see something that is interesting to you you have a project come at you you have to capture it and so no matter what tool you use you go through this process evernote happens to be the top capture tool on the market so we're already off to a good start if we capture everything in evernote so then let's look at where the ideas for what we going to

capture come from one of the biggest use cases that people miss is the web okay especially in a digital environment you're reading blog posts you are researching vendors you're looking at customers you're looking at recipes i mean there's so much we want to collect and typically people use bookmarks to um save that so yeah to save them so evernote though has a browser extension called the web clipper and most people when they realize what the web clipper can do are hooked on evernote moving you know it's like it's it revolutionizes number one how you use

bookmarks it allows you to then uh well here's what it does with the you install the browser extension and then if you have something on the web that you want to save you simply click it and it saves it into evernote for you then everything that it saved becomes searchable because it crossed our threshold into our house evernote also holds the original url back to the original website so it's taken a copy of that website but you can always get back to the website if you need to and um now it's searchable inside evernote uh

anytime you need it and you can edit the note and the page and all kinds of stuff so conceptually it's really really powerful but and a lot of people like like my brother i worked for years to try to get him to use everything you know and good luck convincing your family members and your spouse or whoever it is to to embrace the tools you love but i knew i had him when i got a text from him that said web clippers dope that's all i i call i i call web clipper a second thing

a second better thing after evernote yeah that's exactly right best thing it's just like a big use case and then what it does is it frees up it allows you to then organize too like good luck organizing your browser bookmarks when they get to be hundreds if not thousands of bookmarks right the web clipper changes how i use bookmarks so now bookmarks are reserved specifically for quick access to key sites that i use it not retaining information that i want to reference later so anything if i want to retain or reference in the future or

or research or come back to that's not like a regular like i mean my bookmarks are about my accessing my email my calendar my contacts because i'm doing that all the time you know logging into um the the systems that i use to run my business right so for people that don't know web clipper we have bookmarks we can capture the entire page i like the one that that it that it simplifies the page do you like that one okay so this is the next thing like once people understand the concept of the web clipper

that you can capture anything and not do a bookmark for it you can capture and retain it in evernote then they that's as far as they go but like in my academy where i teach evernote we have a one hour training on all the nuances opportunities and features just of the web clipper a whole hour just on how you can maximize and granularly improve upon your organization of what you're clipping based on the web clipper because it has so many nuances to your point different formats so you can play with the clip formats you can

assign a note title you can assign a tag you can organize it in a notebook you have um secret ways to capture if you are selecting text and then hit the web clipper it'll only capture that so i'll give you the option to only capture that selection you can highlight in simplified article there's official integrations with key sites like amazon or linkedin i mean there's all these nuances that really say what i call it's a concept i talk about a lot is creating micro efficiencies in your workflow so clipping is a huge transformative kind of

idea but then how can we granularly improve upon our clipping process in our workflows and that just takes some evernote skill education so um but look into it and know that it's there um evernote itself has a lot of great lessons on the web clipper or you know you can look for something more official if that interests you so i have a question for your use do you capture it and select a notebook or do you let web clippers select it select it for you that automation from web clipper okay this is a key tip

so that's the other part nobody ever goes through the web clipper settings you absolutely want to go through the web clipper settings because they have something called smart filing and i hate smart filing i hate it me too i always turn it off like evernote's can't do a better job filing my stuff than i do so they try to guess where they think you want things to go and it's one of the top questions you'll see in forums why why can't i find my clip and you're like well because smart filing is turned on and

they put it somewhere that you didn't inten intentionally want it to go so i am adamantly against smart filing turn it off and i and then to your question before that the answer is yes i i organize it from the web clipper sometimes and but most often now i just throw it to my default notebook and then i or i will clean it up and organize it and file it in evernote okay and i've heard you're coming to portugal is that right i can't wait till i come to portugal so okay this gets into my

third tip here so um once you understand you know how search works once you start um capturing through various methods mainly you know the web clipper is a great one to embrace then you really should start to use evernote for something that's meaningful to you like a workflow that has meaning to you because if it has meaning to you you're going to open evernote you're going to work with it you're going to capture notes around it that kind of thing so a common one that i really love and that i use for and one of

the things that helped me to love evernote was travel around travel okay so portugal's high on my list of places to go i mean i it's right at the top um i create one notebook per trip and key to this is i assign a consistent naming convention because it's likely that i'm traveling more than once and i define travel pretty liberally it might be me going to a town two hours away for an overnight trip or a conference or a day trip or could be me flying to portugal i'm based in the us as probably

people probably figured out in texas so it would be you know you can see they're both they're very distinctive types of trips but they're both trips okay so i would create a notebook for each of those and i would assign a naming convention and i suggest um starting with something simple like travel colon okay okay so what that does is that helps you again to and to it helps us to in go into our um natural grouping of liked things so we talked about right at the beginning right so here's an organizational strategy i want

to group like things my travel is like thing so i'm going to use a naming convention and start with travel that'll sort all the t's together and those notebooks will naturally float together and then in my case i use a date because i think the upcoming date is um important and i i game it by starting with the year then the month then the day so that they go in chronological order then i typically put a keyword into the notebook title uh in the case of portugal it would be portugal okay so there's a there's

another tip you can use command j or ctrl key on common g on mac on ctrl q on windows and just type travel and you'll see all your travel notebooks that's the other advantage to that is then i can filter based on now again what is that that's a search tactic yes it's a search tactic that's influencing how i organize my notebooks and i'm putting a keyword in my notebook so that when i because i know about command j which is the search technique command j on the mac um i'm able to filter down to

and look at all of my travel after i've web clipped something into my default notebook that i want to file that's why i always ask what you want to find because if you don't know what you want to find you cannot organize it yeah that's right that's that's so so right yeah but what happens after the trip you you keep the notebook or your your file it depends um typically i dismantle the notebook okay um the event is over and often on the airplane if i'm traveling on an airplane i'll work in offline mode and

i will uh i'll take out i'll purge notes i don't need anymore i'll refile notes that might be related to um another thing like maybe maybe i come a nice meet with you while i'm in portugal and we plan some uh future podcast episodes so that has changed context for me so now i'm going to create a notebook around our future podcast episode and move our notes into that so i use the notebook while i'm on the trip and then i reorganize it and re i look at the context changed when the trip is over

on the other side sometimes i'm like well i'm coming back here or i need to retain this i might merge notes i might put it into a past travel notebook that kind of a thing so you have like a an archive of travels of trips plums or some drips yeah so and what do you have inside those notebooks so i use a lot of things first of all anything that is related to my trip and then i'll use naming conventions on the notes to more granularly organize it inside or sometimes tags as well i have

a template i use a series of templates in my uh travel typically a packing checklist and i'll duplicate that into the travel notebook to make the packing process a little more efficient i also use a concept called the project management note and i pin that note to using a what's called a non-dated reminder i will um add that to my notebook because typically i'm clipping or adding a lot of notes forwarding in reservation confirmations um i'm getting ready to go to charleston south carolina in a couple of weeks so looking at restaurants i'm looking activities

all this is web clipped in i'm coordinating about a retreat i'll be attending so i've got business functions personal functions hotel reservations anything i co-mingle it all in that notebook and then um organize it granularly from there so you create you create an index in that note the project management note is kind of like a a dashboard within the note okay look okay and i use internal note links okay to um to quickly navigate to keynotes inside that notebook so even though everything's kind of co-mingled i'm further granularly organizing it in the notebook through naming

conventions and through a summary note that has uh hyperlinks so i might put like restaurants to try okay and i might hyperlink to all of those i might say you know sites to see i might have a checklist in there of items to uh to ask the facilitator of the retreat i might have tasks in there about things that i need to do i need to cancel or make a reservation that kind of a thing and the and what about things you you capture during the trip do you did you put in a specific notebook

or if it's tripoli related you you put in that notebook it's contextual so i'll do both you know if i'm on the trip i might just capture it there because that's the context i'm in and then you know it's not like the thing is people you can't just in organization systems you just can't capture and do nothing like i told you there's five stages of capture of workflow capture clarify organize engage and do nobody's people are struggling to cap clarify and organize and you have to do those kind of things so i'm like going in

and i'm clarifying if this is part what it's part of like i have a thought process that's helping me to decide where that goes and then the context changes so there's times when i go in and kind of fix it but if the context is around the trip i'll put it i'll put it there in the notebook for the trip i don't like to delete anything you never know because it feels like like i'm deleting part of my memory [Laughter] sometimes but there's you know the other thing is it there's like after on the way

home i mean i don't need that um confirmation of my flight yeah uh anymore yeah i keep that because sometimes i wanna i want some detail of that trip and sometimes the the confirmation i i never know what i what i will need so i have just two notebooks i have i have travel and i have travel in progress in fact it's trip trips and trip in progress and the name implies what it is but so what is in progress what is what is what i'm working on or or the travel i'm doing right now

i i live in this notebook if it's one that it's coming in the future it's also there and maybe i'll if there's there are too much too many of them i'll use tags to to to filter them but when it's done i just move them all the notes to the travel notebook and i never delete it because once in a while there's something oh i wish i had that so i could find this information i could know what i what i want to know now so i i i i feel i feel bad to delete

so just keep it there the nice part is there's really no reason you have to delete it yeah we can store like our entire life there so when are you coming all right so i'll start my notebook today and i'll start i'll start manifesting my trip to portugal i'm ready i love it i can't wait to see it i look forward to seeing you in person and i like the idea that you that you that you have this style of life you work you work there you work from there but you your system let you

work from anywhere well i think it's back to what you opened with i mean the reason i love evernote so much is it shifted how i work and how i live my life and it helps me to have everything i need from my phone in the worst case scenario you know if i need it so it's that's it my passion for evernote is around the fact that it supports me in living you know kind of this mobile mobile lifestyle if i'd like it great and what's step number four okay so one of the great things

about evernote is that they are innovating and updating the application quickly so um two years ago they undertook a major or undertook a major process maybe the process probably started three years ago yeah about a year and a half ago we saw the the fruits of that uh released with a new client called version 10. so visually very similar however most people uh needed some education that it's actually a brand new app it's not a it's not a evolution it was a whole new code base yeah okay so we have uh version 10 and we

have legacy evernote um and over the last year many of the uh features that were in legacy evernote and not in like in version 10. we call that a feature gap um got built back into version 10. so now version 10 is uh really my advised client for for almost all evernote users uh and my and they are iterating on version 10 quickly every two to three weeks evernote releases an update and uh every single time we're seeing some kind of improvement to performance bug fixes and then often they're releasing new features as well so

my next tip is to work in version 10 and keep current with the clients both the desktop and mobile clients because uh it impacts your overall experience and the options you have i i would like to add something here because since you talked about the new evernote evernote 10 i i have this feeling that before ian's mall we had evernote going on a direction of we can do everything with evernote we had presentation mode we had and still have workshop but now it's hidden there and somewhere uh i remember i used to have my blog

and postacho too that would really write evernote notes and transform those notes and pages of this site so i i i'm to blame too i was trying to do to go on that direction do everything with evernote and i think there's a very huge shift in direction here evernote is now more like a dashboard and we are connecting to the other twos and i think that's a more productive way of of using the two what what are your thoughts on that when you're trying to talk about workflows to get things done and use use technology

to support that i mean they're all just tools so use the right tool for the job okay for me evernote's a very powerful tool it's not the only tool i use right but it is my hub it's my dashboard it's my home base and it is where i go primarily but it's the first thing that fires up when i go to my computer in the morning and it's always on and open for me and it's it's my center you know it's my productivity center um it's also not necessarily where i do 100 of everything so

i like to it's excellent for what it's excellent for and that is it's a very flexible platform so i can customize it to meet whatever workflow goal i want uh that's one of the key things we talked about search and i can find and retrieve if it's in everyone but you know i work with an editor often and we're collaborating in a writing environment where we need to co-edit documents and create comments and do all these kinds of things um that is a tool that we find google docs better suited for okay just one example

so i have a google doc i have a process with her where i am working on something and then we can you know write comments we can edit we can suggest we can do all kinds of things we have a whole conversation separate tool however i take the step of getting that share link from that google doc and putting it in evernote which is managing my content creation process so i have a bunch of things beyond that single doc that are i track in evernote and that doc is one piece of my entire puzzle so

that link to that google doc to make it easy for me to get over there which by the way evernote has a official integration with google so they make it very easy to to get between the two uh platforms um but any any public link from real world service will work um you know i'm using evernote for what it's best for and that is the project management portion of it the dashboard functionality and then i'm using google for that live editing just out of university do you do you like you work on a draft on

the note when you're working on well quite honestly my first draft is in evernote so i open evernote i write my my outline or my notes and then at some point when i need to pull her into it uh and i know that we're going to move into kind of an editing and feedback stage i'm moving i'm just copying pasting i'm renaming it to draft one for whatever it is and then i grab the share link on that google doc and add it to my draft one um so i'm tracking my process there and and

using the tool that's best for the for the goal and there's a there's a quote from phil libben that you you like and i i like it too what what is that well i i may not say it quite right but back when they were doing conferences right back at the um he was saying like look you can evernote can be your hub it can be your center he's like and you can store things in evernote but it's not we you don't store everything in evernote it's not where we want you to store your copy

of avatar which is infamously like the longest biggest movie ever right so um it's like it's not the right tool to store everything um i think it's the right tool to reference everything okay so here's the thing is like if you're gonna use evernote in the way i use evernote and the way you use evernote to really have all of these these dashboard benefits and go deep with the platform there's a lot to learn right i've spent years self learning and developing and it's possible to do go to ever you know but the tip here

is you have to create a structure to embrace and keep up with what evernote's doing they're evolving it's a deep platform there's so many little nuances um and then they're evolving quickly right so that creates an environment where if you're going to stay sharp with it you need to be um you need to to constantly learn with it so create a structure around that uh and you can self learn or you can pay to learn right so it's really what works for you if you want to self learn evernote does an amazing job um on

youtube and with their their help articles those are two great resources glad you've got a great resources on your your youtube channel and there's all kinds of things that you can do to self learn and keep up it's the way i went you know the thing is i've been doing this now 12 years or more so i have a deep history and and understand on the path with it um but you can self-learn no problem there's also paid resources you know i have an academy where it's a membership training evernote membership academy where you learn

everything you need to have evernote applied to your workflows the skills and the workflows and you get access to me in a community environment you know i can cut the learning curve for you and help focus the time so there's different options but i might the tip around it is create a structure to learn right and having some accountability in some form or another in order to constantly incrementally improve your skills is important whether that's simply time blocking say i'm going to do one hour a week on improving my evernote education you can go through

a free or paid resource to do that i think that's part of the key to um learning and what i have found is that i actually learn better in accountability groups so i'm a member of a lot of different uh or actually a hand i'd say a handful of communities that facilitate like online co-working and it's become so important that it's actually a offering i do within the academy for um my gtd members uh we co-work together because that accountability element really helps people to embrace it a little bit more there's so much to learn

and to do with what evernote already have and they're like you said they are improving like every two three weeks like you i i'm with this like 12 years but i have to stop and learn oh okay this is a there's a new feature here what's happening what's going on well it's fun and and peop and users have questions so like even just at the time of recording this last week they pushed out calendar notifications right so i had users in my community like going hey what's this calendar notification right so if you're not in

getting if you're not working one-on-one with somebody or in a community you've got to stop and try to figure out if you're what that means to you right um but it's also powerful and something to know about so just kind of create know that that's going to happen and create a structure for yourself whether you're time blocking and going a free route or time blocking and working one-on-one with somebody or time work or walking and working in a community um there's lots to learn and i think it's well worth i i know it's well worth

the time i see the transformation in people's workplaces what what where can people go to find the academy uh so my website harmanenterprises.com will get you to uh the products i offer and that is the academy there it's just forward slash academy great anything else you want to add oh no i love talking evernote and it's so much fun to discuss it with you so i i hope you come back in the future do it we do it outside of this scenario all the time so it's nice to do it on camera but um yeah

always fun to like geek out and and talk about our favorite tools so thanks for having me thank you for coming see you bye bye