We all get in a habit of saving little pieces of paper as a reminder.  A business card, a flyer, an advertisement. Unfortunately, it often just ends up becoming paper clutter. One of my absolute favorite solutions to this problem is EVERNOTE. Evernote is a note-taking app that allows you to save just about anything in a way that is searchable, and accessible on all your devices and the web.  Notes are completely searchable, and can be organized into notebooks. Notes can be shared with others, or made only available locally if you don’t want them in the cloud. It’s a wonderful product.  Using Evernote gives you an easy way to deal with all those random little pieces of paper we gather and don’t know where to file.  Even if you don’t remember if you saved that smoothie recipe, you can search “smoothie” and see if you did.

I've used it for many years, I keep finding new ways use it. Having it on my computer and phone has saved me in more situations than I can count. Maybe you have heard of it, even tried it - but haven't yet figured out how to make it work for you. To illustrate its value, here’s a sampling what I have saved in Evernote:

• Packing lists for different types of vacations (has checkboxes!) I print out for each kid to pack their own suitcases.

• Lists of meals the family likes to help with meal planning

• Pictures of plants my neighbor recommended for my front yard (Taken on my phone within Evernote)

• Articles & Recipes I saw on the internet (saved with one-click using the Evernote webclipper feature in my browser)

• Notes from my daughter’s annual checkup (I update the stats each year)

• My dog’s vaccination records (saved as a pdf attached to a note, which also has her microchip and breeding info in it.)

• PDF of my our school directory (easy to search for any parent’s number)

• Picture of the back of my printer so I have easy access to the serial number.

• Contact information for an interior designer I met (take a picture of a business card and it creates fields for each piece of info.)

To help you get it even more, check out this little video dive into my Evernote app:

Evernote markets itself as “your second brain”. The older I get, the more value this has.  :)