Evernote is a tool I love; I use it for email archiving, as a task manager, for school notes and as a place to put important files if I need them quickly.
Where to find your account type
If you are an Evernote Power User, you may have wanted to become Premium before, but the high price put you off, or you were not sure you would need the features. Below is a comparison chart showing the differences between account types.
The features I use the most are PDF annotation, boosted monthly upload limit and the Context feature.
I would upgrade to Premium if you find yourself hitting your monthly balance, wanting to annotate PDFs or wanting more collaborative features, and if it is your ‘digital’ brain.
Lucidchart is a amazing app. It allows you to make mockups, diagrams, mindmaps, and many more other things.
The Lucidchart logo
The UI (user interface) is also very simple and easy to use, and you can quickly make graphs, mockups, venn diagrams and more easily in Lucidchart. If you are PRO user, you get 1 gigabyte of space, which is plenty of space even if you are a power-user. It is also very easy to add your own images, and find images on Google, Flickr and Facebook.
An example map open in the Lucidchart desktop software
One of the best thing Lucidchart offers for students is the option to have PRO accounts for free. This gives you more space, email and web support, wireframing and mockups, revision history and many more features; all for free (if you are a student or professor)!
All of my BCS school notes in Evernote have mindmaps which were made in Lucidchart
Lucidchart is also great because it is available offline. This is very helpful if you are a student and want to do brainstorming or a mockup on the bus, train, or in areas with no wifi connection. To get the offline software, you need to download the Chrome app here (Google account required). You can also use Lucidchart on your browser, but internet connection is required.
The Lucidchart shortcut on my desktop
Lucidchart also offers a publication suite, Lucidpress. It also offers free accounts for students.
Lucidchart is a great piece of software for students and non-students alike. Its great for making your notes look better, for mindmapping and for mockups. I would defiantly recommend this piece of software.
Moleskines are tools which are used by many. They can be used for many things, such as normal notetaking, a planner, a calendar, a PDA and many more (to see a list of the most popular ones, click here). In the course of this post, you will (hopefully) be finding out how to make my favorite Moleskine hack. All you need is the below things:
1. A Moleskine! 2. Sticky tabs (5-6 (5 yellow and 4 blue preferably)) 3. Post-it notes 4. A pen 5. A ruler
The first thing you will need to do is number all the pages in the bottom right (or top if you want). I did every odd number. Then, get your sticky tabs. You will have 5 tabs: Inbox, Someday, Projects, (if you have a blog you can have a another one titled Blog), research and book recommendations.
On page 1, write at the top ‘abbreviations’. This is a section where you put words and abbreviations you come across when reading and want to look up later.
I didn’t have any sticky tabs, so I just cut up post-it notes and wrote on them then stuck them in with glue. On page , place a tab and title it as ‘Inbox’. This is were everything will go; place website info, calendar dates, to-dos and notes here. Some will be moved to the Project tab or other tabs.
The Inbox tab
Then, place the ‘Someday’ tab on page 50. This is where everything you want to do someday goes e.g: Go on holiday to Florida.
The Someday tab
Then, I have the Projects tab on page 57. I put it here as I did not think I would put much into ‘Someday’. The projects tab is where all tasks which have more than one tasks. Projects can also have notes. If I was doing a project on the ancient city on Mycenae, I would put all my notes, to-dos, website links and other things in that project.
The Projects tab
Next comes the vital student tab: the ‘Research’ tab. I have this on page 101. This is where you write notes, research questions and make mindmaps. This is probably my second most used area of my Moleskine. I then have a blog tab (on page 153), which is basically a glorified to-do list, but if you don’t have a blog, there is basically no point to this tab.
The Research tab
The next essential tab for a student is the book recommendations (I have gone a bit further than that and have added YouTube videos, music, e.t.c). This section also grows quite quickly.
The Book Recommendations tab
One of my favorite bit of this hack is the key. My most used symbols are: @EN and @WL (EN for Evernote and WL for Wunderlist). I put these symbols and my other ones (see the image) in a context column, so I can easily scan down and see what’s important and what I need to add to what. This key can also be used as a second bookmark.
The Key
I then use sticky tabs so that I can easily find my way around; a yellow sticky tab means that there is active content on the page (to-dos that are not ticked off, notes that I am still using, dates I need to add to Calendars 5, e.t.c). A blue tab marks the current page that I am up to (the page which I can add more stuff to the sections).
I love my Moleskine, and the way I can quickly find what I want to do. I would recommend that you make one and try it out (if you want to) too.
Feel free to share pictures of how you hacked your Moleskine!
Wunderlistis my tool for simple tasks or large tasks, and I love its simplicity and beauty.
The Wunderlist logo
I choose Wunderlist after trying out many task managers such as Things, Asana, Azendoo and Producteev. I sticked with Things for a while, but I found it irritating that I could not access my todos on my PC. I decided to try out the other apps, but I choose Wunderlist over everything else as I could easily access it offline on all my devices, and I loved the way you could organize it.
One of my lists
The list feature is a very important feature of Wunderlist. My Kill list is the list everything goes into when I need to complete it. If I get an assignment from school, I will place it into my school list and hashtag it with the appropriate hashtag, and when I am ready to use it, I place it into my Kill list. In my Inbox is all the items I cannot/can’t be bothered to categorise.
If you look at the list at the bottom, you can see a symbol of two people. That means the list is shared. This means you can assign people to a task, and the people you have shared it with can add tasks and tick tasks off.
A task
Another feature I love is hashtags. If I have many Chemistry assignments, I can hashtag them with this: #chemistry. When I click on the hashtag, it shows all todos with that hashtag regardless of which list it is on. This is very useful, as I can see related tasks regardless of which list they are on.
If some of my information is on Evernote I can simply paste the notelink into the ‘notes’ section of the task, but I am hoping that Wunderlist will release integration with Evernote.
I find that Wunderlist is a really cool tool, and it is so helpful that you can get it on all devices, and you can access tasks regardless of your internet status. I find it simple to use, easy to find content with, and I also find it looks very pretty. I would defiantly recommend that you try it out.
Evernote is one of my favorite tools; I use it for everything, from school work to recipes to websites I clip to read later.
My ‘English’ notebook
When I first got Evernote I tagged every note with around 7 tags, and I had hundreds of notebooks which had around 2 notes in them each. After reading Micheal Hyatt’s blog, and how he now organises his notes, I decided to try and adopt his method of having two notebooks: Inbox and Cabinet. The Inbox is my default notebook, and it is where all my notes go if I send them to my account or clip anything to my account using Evernote Clearly or Evernote Web Clipper.
Where you can find your Evernote email and upload allowance
I tag each note carefully and then move it to the .Cabinet notebook. I can then go to the tags section, where I can see all my tags, and select which one I want. This enables me to easily find all my notes.
I decided not to use individual notebooks as you only have a limit of 250 of these, but 100 for saved searches, and a limit of 100,000 tags. One of my most used saved searches is this: ‘tag:school tag:year9 created:day-0’. This brings up all my notes which are tagged with ‘school’ and ‘year9’ and which have been created today.
I love Evernote. I use it all the time, and you would be hard-pressed to find me without a device with Evernote on. I love its simplicity, the way you can easily organise it, and all the integrations it has with other apps and programs.
My current tags
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Do you have Evernote? Feel free to comment on how you use it in the comments section below.
