Evernote for academics

Yesterday evening, I attended a very good workshop in Berlin about basic and advanced features of Evernote. I started to use it a while ago, but without continuity and as my projects diversify - especially the blogging ones - I felt the need to find out a good alternative to a multiplicity of files, dossiers, hand written notes and notebooks. 

I will refer here strictly to the the offer for the academic projects, as I intend to write a detailed description of the lessons learned of the workshop on my PR and communication blog later in the day. 

Evernote is available in three versions: free, business (5Euro/month) and premium (10 Euro/month). Its keyword is 'organization' as it mostly allows to set up your files around various tags. For the business and premium versions, extended collaborative features are available, allowing the possibility to share and work a file as part of a larger team. For the academics, it can be a relevant option for peer-reviews and multi-authors articles.

In case that you are looking for specific materials in your archives, the 'search' option make possible to find out what you are looking for browsing not only .word docs, but also PDFs and Excel among others. Another good option that I intend to use frequently is that allowing to save articles of interest for a later lecture. Right now, I do have a long list of bookmarked items on my computer, but it goes very slowly and very often I have no idea what I saved. With the help of the tag, Evernote makes possible a better management of the material. The texts can not only be saved, but also annotated, and it suits academics very well. The Skitch app, that can be downloaded from Evernote's website, gives even more options of editing and annotation of pictures.

Further on, the files can be organized up to their priority status, around a large array of tags, describing both the priority status as well as the main topics covered. The latter may be very helpful when one needs to search for specific terms later on.

Another app allows the photographic transfer of hand written notes. From an academic perspective, this can work not only for the scribbles notes in the library, but also for documents necessary for the historical analysis that can be automatically scanned and saved for later. I know some people that will be more than happy to find out that such an option exists, as an alternative to hand writing documents. The document saved like this can be annotated. The integration of the document may last more than usual, 15-20 minutes. 

I am always interested to save as much time as possible and the yesterday presentation outlined a couple of advantages for time management freaks like me: once you are part of a team, one can set up deadline calls and automatic updates of the status. Thus, you should not spend hours sending e-mails and asking everyone what's going on and waiting for answers. Everything can be done with one click. 

As for the e-mails, those unanswered can be saved in a special file, tracking their status. No more worries that you forgot something, it seems that Evernote can do a lot of work for you now. 

With so much work to manage I most probably transfer now part of my files on Evernote, because even for academics, times can really be money.