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I started jotting down ideas for this post during breakfast this morning on my Galaxy Nexus. I picked up on those thoughts and began outlining and writing on my MacBook when I got into the office, and I’m sure I’ll add more than a few revisions via my iPad tonight while sitting in front of the TV.

I’ve written brainstorm briefs that started in the back of a cab and finished in an aisle seat at thirty-thousand feet, read hundreds of Gamasutra exclusives and Sports Guy mailbags from internet dead zones during weekend getaways, and even penned my wedding vows from a barstool at Morton’s.

In all of these varied examples, across many different screens, the one constant has been the “canvas”, so to speak. That canvas is Evernote.

 

Evernote is a cross-platform service suite designed for note taking in our digital world. Sure, you can take traditional notes – simple formatted text – but in Evernote a “note” can also be a voice recording, a photo, a web excerpt, or even images of handwritten notes from a whiteboarding session or your old school pen and paper notebook. All of these notes are taggable, sortable, and searchable - yes, even the images: optical character recognition (OCR) transforms pixels into annotated text. Evernote’s ad-supported free version is a pretty full-featured solution, but the $45/year premium upgrade gives you more monthly cloud storage space as well as enables offline viewing and editing of your notes – a must for those wifi-less flights and weekend roadtrips through the cell tower void hills of God’s country.

Evernote contains my to-do list, grocery list, meeting notes, pictures of favorite bottles of wine, concept write-ups, web clippings, whiteboard pictures, sneaker cop lists, reminders, half-written posts, and dozens of random thoughts that, I thought, were worth saving for one reason or another. I used to carry around a mini Moleskine to serve a similar purpose, but too often found myself without a pen or an extra pocket, or in need of a reminder to remember to bring my reminder maker. Like Netflix, Evernote is on just about every device I interact with throughout the course of a day, with the exception of my Xbox – ubiquity definitely equals utility.

I could just use Google Drive or Dropbox for many of the examples I mention above, and while both are super powerful, customizable solutions, I’ve found neither fit my workflow, “ideaflow”, or are as simple and easy to use as Evernote. In this case, accessibility outweighs customization. And yes, there are times when I miss the pen to paper approach with all its inherent creative benefits and outlets, but I haven’t completely left that interface behind (and never will), and with a quick smartphone photo of a sketchbook page or whiteboard diagram, I don’t have to. Heck, thanks to the iPad’s growing suite of sketchbook options (Noteshelf and Paper are favorites, though Evernote just bought Penultimate) and Applydea’s Maglus stylus, there are days when I’m all digital, all the time while still satisfying that traditional style.

So, countless cloud-synced tweaks, nine hours, and three devices later, my little Evernote love note comes to a close, as does today’s to-do list. Well, almost – just need to figure out this week’s top cops.

 

image sources: Evernote, Nike Sportswear