Taking Notes

Note taking is important in many fields of endeavor, be they editorial, engineering, management or something else. I’ve always taken notes on a yellow pad, and have born the burden of this outdated method. My notes are scattered all over the place and are sometimes tough to locate when I need them. I’ve observed other people’s note taking habits and found that many good note takers use a bound book for their notes. But they have trouble, too. When trying to locate old notes, they invariably thumb through the pages of the notebook. But at least the notes are all in one place; that is, the ones that are included in a particular notebook. At a recent company meeting, I noticed that a few of the good note takers, who had previously been using a bound book, had moved on to Microsoft’s new OneNote product. I thought about doing that, too, but never got around to it. I also noticed that some of the latest notebook computers were including OneNote in the software bundle, otherwise the cost is about $100. Then a couple of weeks ago I went to a tradeshow in New York called DigitalLife. As I was walking the show floor, a fellow named Michael Lunsford asked if I wanted to see a demo of his company’s new note-taking product. He is the VP of product management at a company called EverNote. Though skeptical at first, I was blown away by the product’s capabilities. Called EverNote, it accepts keyboard or pen input, works on a bunch of different computing platforms and has lots of other features that I could never fully describe here. Best of all, EverNote is free right now. You can check it out at www.evernote.com. E-mail your comments to me at [email protected].