CLIP IT ALL - Great for research—clip any article or web page - Clip to a specific notebook and assign tags - Use Evernote to find clips on any device HIGHLIGHT AND SHARE - Highlight key text from any website or article - Share and email clips or create a URL link CUSTOMIZE CLIPS - Special formats for LinkedIn, Amazon & YouTube - Clip Gmail. Important project communication gets lost in a crowded inbox. With Evernote, add the power of Evernote right into your email composer. Save emails from Outlook to Evernote and organize them with the rest of the project, or quickly add notes from Evernote to any Outlook email to share them with others.
Life is hectic and schedules are packed, which is why we practically live on our calendars. And Evernote users need access to their notes at all times. But if we’re continuously looking between Evernote and our calendar every day, it’s easy for important meetings or notes to fall through the cracks.
Some calendars have note-taking features. Some note-taking apps have a calendar. But they’re never quite as good as their true specialty. Since we’re pretty comfortable with our calendars of choice, is there a way to combine these two tools?
Luckily, some of the most popular calendars in the world can be synced with Evernote. This lets you assign dates to to-do lists and notes. We’re going to cover how to sync calendars like Google and Outlook, the apps that make it easier, and how to juggle the endless scheduling of modern life.
So how do we create an effective Evernote calendar?
What is Evernote and what is it good for?
Evernote is a multi-platform note-taking application. It saves notes, to-do lists, images, media, and even webpages in a central location on the cloud. These notes can be organized into customizable folders called notebooks. Notes can be tagged like a blog, allowing you to sort and search your notes by topic.
It’s relatively easy to use, and there are tons of helpful Evernote tutorials online. Notes are stored in the cloud and accessible anywhere. Even the free version syncs with two devices. It also comes with a helpful feature called Evernote Web Clipper. The Web Clipper is a Chrome extension that lets you grab things from the internet and send them to your notebooks.
This includes straight or simplified versions of any website. This is particularly useful with cluttered websites that you need to reference often.
We’re not here to sell you Evernote, which has its own ups and downs. And, unfortunately, there is no native Evernote calendar. Instead, we’re here to help you combine two workflows into one without uprooting your entire calendar or notebook.
Connecting Google Calendar with Evernote Calendar
Google Calendar is one of the most popular calendars in the world. It’s useful, packed with features, and compatible with everything. Combining it with Evernote makes perfect sense.
The low-tech solution is to just grab your Evernote link and paste it into a calendar event. However, it’s much faster to automate the process. Plus, these applets create links both ways. Changes in Evernote can sync to the calendar, and vice versa.
Creating an Evernote Calendar journal from Google Calendar events
The following techniques use the IFTTT applet to customize both your Google Calendar and your Evernote.
IFTTT (“If This Then That”) helps you create conditional statements that can link your calendar and your Evernote for a number of different purposes.
If you’re interested in creating a journal in your Evernote that records your Google Calendar events, simply go to the IFTTT page linked here, or search for it on the main IFTTT page. They will ask for permission to access your Google Calendar: simply follow all of the click-throughs to get to a page that looks like this:
From there, follow the prompts and dropdowns to specify which calendar you’d like to create a journal from: contacts, birthdays, a work calendar, a personal calendar, etc.
You can choose the time you want the journal entry made in Evernote. It comes with four settings: 0 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and 45 minutes after the event enters the calendar.
From there, the applet shows you a template of how the journal entry will look. You can customize the name of the new journal notebook and add tags to the journal note.
Then, click the big “Save” button. It will offer a confirmation prompt, and then your new Evernote/Google Calendar event journal is good to go.
These journals are useful for looking at your schedule long-term. You can see how much time you’ve spent in meetings. You can judge the length of those meetings against their usefulness. You can also use the generated journals for work reports or to account for your time on projects.
Creating Evernote calendar reminders for Google events
Again, we’ll be using IFTTT to create a simple script. This script creates events in Google Calendar for reminders you make in Evernote.
First, navigate to the recipe page and click the “Connect” button. Follow any permission, authorization, and Google login prompts.
Choose which calendar you’d like the Evernote reminders to go to and click save. The best part is you can create these reminders for different calendars. Make a reminder in Evernote about your new co-worker’s birthday and send it right to the birthday calendar, for example.
Both of these methods allow you to send the most useful data between Evernote and Google Calendar.
Syncing Apple Calendar and Evernote Calendar
While Google’s calendar is generally considered more powerful, Apple’s 50% mobile market share means many people still use its native calendar. And while it does sync with iCloud, it doesn’t natively talk to Evernote.
IFTTT allows iPhone and iOS users to sync between Apple Calendar and Evernote. The process is similar to syncing with Google, with small differences. Namely, the need to download the IFTTT app to an iOS device. If you work on multiple devices, you’ll need to download the app to each one.
You can sync reminders and to-do lists and even create Siri integration with Evernote. Consider, too, the widespread nature of the Apple environment. If you have an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and an Apple Smart Home, connecting your existing Evernote account means true accessibility.
Syncing iOS reminders with an Evernote list
This IFTTT recipe will push reminders you create in the iOS calendar into a checklist on Evernote.
Navigate to the IFTTT page linked above and press “connect.” A pop-up will then ask for your phone number to send you an IFTTT download link. You have to download the IFTTT to your device for full integration.
Next, you’ll see a screen to customize how your reminders will look in the Evernote checklist.
Fields for Title, the To-do list entry, choice of Notebook, and Tags can be altered or kept as-is. Then, click “Save,” and the reminders you create on your iPhone will jump right to a clickable checklist in Evernote.
Evernote Vs Onenote
Integrating Siri and Evernote
If you don’t physically add calendar reminders and prefer voice command, there’s a different IFTTT recipe. This feature also requires the IFTTT app on your Apple device. So, go to the recipe page, click connect, and fill out the following:
Once the app is downloaded and installed, the process is straightforward. When Siri adds a reminder through voice command, it triggers the applet. In the recipe page, you can name the list, title the note, and customize the body with simple HTML tags. Again, the tags and the name of the notebook can be tailored to your organization style.
Creating notes for iOS Calendar events
Want Evernote notebooks for the calendar events that appear in your iOS Calendar? These notebooks are useful for notes taken during a call or for reflections after. They can even become a loose client database or home for your staff meeting notes.
The first step is to go to the IFTTT recipe page. Click “connect.” The next page specifies how the details from the event will import into Evernote.
Next, choose the calendar name. Shift team meeting calendars into one notebook, client meetings into another, however you want to arrange your calendar. Again, using this recipe multiple times on different calendars may be a good idea. Choose a notebook, then tag with words like “meeting,” “birthday,” or “client.” These tags make organization in Evernote extremely granular.
Click “Save” when you’re done.
Connecting Outlook’s Calendar to Evernote
Microsoft’s Outlook calendar is commonly used in offices everywhere. It has a huge install base—over 400 million users, in fact. If you are taking Evernote into the workplace, which comes with its own complications, these two can be combined to create something better.
Zapier connects Outlook and Evernote
How To Use Evernote Tutorial
Zapier is extremely similar to IFTTT in that it’s an applet that creates customized scripts for a ton of different purposes.
Evernote How To Guide
Zapier creates custom triggers for every possible combination of Evernote and Outlook’s calendar that you might need. Basically, you decide a trigger (what starts up Zapier) and the action that will occur when the event is triggered—simple if-then conditional statements. They look like this in the Zapier interface:
On the left is the “trigger,” which can be changed in the dropdown menu by the arrows on the right. The right is the “event.”
In the example, we’ve decided that when a new email is created in Outlook (the trigger), a note is created in Evernote with details on the email. You could also have a “New Notebook” created when you “Create a Contact” in Outlook. This would start a new file on a client. Or when you set a “New Reminder” in Evernote, it creates an event in Outlook.
Below are just some of the various triggers and events. They can be mixed and matched in Zapier for whatever situation you can dream up.
Once you’ve chosen your trigger and your event, click the big blue button—“Connect Evernote + Microsoft Office.” Then, follow any login prompts for either service.
Now you’re synced, connected, and ready to spend less time shuffling between apps to make your day work.
Other Apps for Evernote Calendar Integration
There are a few other apps that combine Evernote with your calendar. They’re simple to use and take the pressure off you.
Cronofy and zzBots both use similar visual interfaces to connect your calendar with Evernote. You have the freedom to pick and choose the apps that match your workflow. And both Zapier and IFTTT can be used for Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Mail, and dozens of other platforms.
No matter your platform, there is a program, applet, or script that can turn Evernote into more than just a note-taking service. This would be much easier if Evernote had its own calendar, but until then, these workarounds should do the trick.
The internet is full of apps that promise to harness technology to improve your productivity. Some of these products are pretty good, but many turn out to be gimmicky, expensive, or complicated to set up or use. That’s why so many of these apps become fly-by-night fads.
But one productivity app that is definitely not a fad is Evernote. Introduced in 2000, it began as a simple note-taking and web clipping tool, but has developed into robust software that supports image capture, voice notes, and handwriting recognition. These notes can be geotagged, emailed, labeled, and synced across a range of devices. The basic version of Evernote remains free, but the paid version of Evernote Pro integrates with other popular tools like Google Drive, Slack, and Microsoft Outlook and Teams.
So…should you be using Evernote? Read on to learn more about how this app works, how to use Evernote effectively, and discover handy tips and tricks that will turn you into an expert in no time.
What Is Evernote?
Evernote is primarily a note-taking app. Notes can be organized using searchable tags you apply to notes, but the best way to organize notes is through virtual notebooks. Each notebook contains a collection of notes that are related. For instance, a student might have one notebook for all of his notes on biology and another notebook for math. Someone else might decide to have one notebook for minutes from a work committee and another notebook for the kids’ school reminders. However a user decides to set up their notebooks, they can have up to 250 notebooks and 100,000 individual notes.
One nice feature of Evernote is that users can format notes in different ways. The Evernote composing screen is similar to MS Word and the default style for notes is long chunks of text. But formatting tools along the top of Evernote allow you to change your note to a to-do list, bulleted or numbered lists, or a chart. You can also incorporate images, voice notes, or information from integrated apps directly into your note. The app also incorporates a robust search tool so that notes can be located quickly even if you have lots of notebooks and lots of individual notes. If you understand these basics, learning how to use Evernote’s more advanced features will be a breeze.
How To Use Evernote Effectively
If you’re new to Evernote, it can seem overwhelming. A general rule I find with technology is the more it can do, the more complicated it is to learn. Thankfully, Evernote will feel familiar to anyone who has used a word processing application like MS Word or Google Docs because it works very similarly. But just in case you need a little help getting started, here are a few suggestions to get you off on the right foot.
- Download the desktop version. You can use Evernote on mobile devices, however, the desktop version gives you the most power when it comes to organizing your notes, especially if you’re a heavy note-taker with hundreds of notes and notebooks to organize. You can download Evernote for free on either Windows or Mac and it will sync with your mobile devices so you can carry your notes everywhere.
- Organize using themed notebooks. I mentioned before that the best way to organize notes is in notebooks, but it’s worth mentioning again. Tags can definitely be helpful when searching for notes on your PC or Mac, but tags do not integrate the same way across all devices, so if you create a bunch of loose notes and plan to use tags to keep them sorted, you might find this is only effective part of the time.
- Use your default notebook as an inbox. When you create your first note in Evernote, it will be stored in a default notebook. Some time management experts say that using this default notebook as a to-do list is a great way to make sure everything gets done in a timely fashion. The way this works is similar to how some people use their email inbox as a to-do list; create a note and once you have fully dealt with all the tasks related to that note, then you can move it to a different notebook for long-term storage.
- Use consistent naming conventions. This is a great tip that comes from Stacey Harmon on the Keep Productive channel on YouTube. According to Harmon, if you follow patterns for naming your notes and notebooks, then finding them later will be easy regardless of whether you simply scroll through your notes or you rely on Evernote’s search feature. A good naming convention should include a keyword or phrase that will quickly identify the note’s topic and relevance. If the note is part of a series, you might use the same title for each note and add a number or letter to indicate the sequence of the notes. (For example, you might have a naming convention like “Technology Committee – Security Training for Employees #2” or “Shakespeare Lecture: Macbeth – B.”) This way, when you search you will quickly bring up all of these related notes at once.
- Merge related notes. Say you’ve worked on a project at work for three months, taking notes on the project the whole time. By the end of the project, you might have dozens of short bits of information stored as individual notes. A good way to store these notes might be to merge them into one note instead of keeping them separate. To do this, hold down Ctrl and select each note you want to merge. A menu will open at the bottom of your screen. Select “Merge” and your notes will be combined into one document with each note labeled within that document. This way you can skim to quickly find the note you want without having to open each individual note. One caveat: merging notes cannot be undone, so before you do this, make sure you want the notes combined.
- Gather notes from outside Evernote. The Evernote Corporation actually makes multiple apps that work seamlessly with their primary product, Evernote. These include features that let you “grab and send” content to Evernote, where you can treat this content as a note itself or integrate it into your other notes.
- Web Clipper is a browser plugin that allows you to save webpages, articles, and PDFs into Evernote. You can also highlight and save portions of what you see on your screen, such as short text quotes. When this information enters Evernote, it will automatically have a URL to the page attached so you can always return to the source.
- Scannable is an iOS app that allows you to digitize paper by taking a picture of it. You simply photograph the paper and label the image as a photo, document, color document, post-it, or business card. Then you can organize the image just like any other note, including applying labels and assigning it to notebooks. Best of all, handwritten notes become searchable text once incorporated into Evernote.
- If you’re an Android user, you can use the camera tool within Evernote to get most of the same features that Scannable offers. This is a great feature for people who like taking notes by hand, but may want a backup copy or a way to take their notes with them even if they leave their favorite paper notebook behind.
- Connect Evernote to Pocket. Back in February, we wrote about how much we love Pocket. If you’re a fan as well, then you might be interested in connecting your Pocket account to Evernote. Doing this will allow you to automatically sync your Pocket articles to Evernote, or just save Pocket items that you star or archive. This enables you to use Evernote’s powerful search functions to keep up with your favorite Pocket articles more effectively.
- Use the Evernote YouTube Channel. This is a great way to learn how to use more advanced Evernote features, find out what changes are happening with the app, and get a sneak peek at the paid features so you can decide what level of use you need to get the most from the app. You can find the Evernote YouTube Channel here.
Advanced Tips For Heavy Evernote Users
Even if you’re pretty comfortable using Evernote, it’s likely the app can still surprise you with some of its more advanced features. The Evernote Corporation is constantly adding to their flagship software to keep it relevant, exciting, and useful. So read on to learn how to make the most of your Evernote account.
- Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to speed up your note-taking during meetings or lectures. Evernote has an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts, or you can create your own.
- Note links work like hyperlinks, except that they link from one note to another. This is great if you want to create a single note as a reference point for lots of information, such as one note with links to each intranet system you use at work or a meeting agenda with links to specific notes that need to be covered during the meeting. It’s also a great way to keep research straight. To create a hyperlink between two notes, right-click on the note you want to link to. Choose “Copy Internal Link.” Then go to the note where you want to embed the link and select “paste.” Evernote will paste the title of the note you are linking to with an embedded hyperlink leading to that note.
- A table of contents can be a really useful way to organize multiple related notes. This is similar to merging notes, except that instead of deleting those notes and replacing them with one new, combined document, a table contents will create a new document with individual links to each separate note. This new document can be handy for sharing with coworkers who may need to be able to reference your notes quickly. For instance, as Scott Friesen points out, a table of contents could be useful for inclusion in a meeting agenda, with each item in the table of contents linking to relevant data, visuals, or other useful information.
- Anchor notes are the brainchild of Scott Dotto (who actually teaches a course on using Evernote, just in case you’re interested). Think of an anchor note as a quick reference guide. Like a table of contents, an anchor note links to other notes, working as a useful starting point for finding the note you need. Dotto gives an example of using an anchor note to record information about your house that is important but hard to remember, such as the size filter used in your air return. You can create a note for your air filter, including a picture of the filter brand you use, a link to Amazon or Lowes or wherever you can order replacement filters, and the measurements for the filter. This note can then be included in an anchor note about your house, which might include similar notes about the type of bulbs used in different rooms, information about water filters in your refrigerator or sink, and so on. The advantage here is that the anchor note saves you from having to go physically track down information or electronically search through Evernote to find important information all over again every time you need that information.
- Advanced search features are one thing heavy users continually say sets Evernote apart from competitors. The basic search in Evernote is pretty good, so it’s not surprising that many users never go beyond that, but the longer you use Evernote and the more notes and notebooks that pile up in your account, the less efficient the basic search becomes. That’s why being able to access the advanced search is so handy. At first glance, the advanced search may look a little like coding with its reliance on colons and lack of spaces between words, but Evernote makes the advanced search operators available online so that any user can copy and paste it into Evernote and start search their notes based on criteria such as keywords in title, notes stored in a specific notebook, date created, date updated, and so on.
One Powerful Tool Among Many
Evernote is certainly not the only note-taking tool on the market, but it’s one of the most popular because of its depth, completeness, and widespread integration. The fact that its free version offers so many options and operates on a truly free (not freemium) model, as well as its longevity, give the app a lot of credibility with users, too.
If you find this post on Evernote helpful, or you’re interested in other ways to boost your productivity, then be sure to come back to the TracSoft blog, where we’ll be discussing productivity tools all month long.
Are you suddenly working from home and struggling to stay productive? Are you having trouble staying connected to work when you’re not physically there? Then check out our blog post “Working From Home: Tips For Productivity And Communication” for ways to increase your productivity and make working from home work for you.
Evernote Link To Another Note
One of the best ways to stay productive is to delegate tasks that require too much time or skills that are beyond your ability. Don’t struggle with IT issues on your own. Outsource those to the experienced team at TracSoft! We offer managed IT services for small and medium-sized businesses, including managing system and software updates, regular data backup, and security. Schedule a meeting today to find out how TracSoft can make your workday run smoothly.
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