Organize All Your Notes in One Place
If you're like most entrepreneurs, you have various ways of keeping track of your information, from flashes of insights to interesting things that you've read or should read to memorable images and reminders. Some of this data is better-organized, some less so. You may use sticky notes and notepads for some and digital documents for others. No matter how you capture the data, the proof of good organization is in how easily you can find the information you need later.

Digital note-taking applications offer a more structured way of organizing all of these pieces of information that come in different types and formats. They may be very useful for both personal and professional productivity. Two of the most popular ones are Evernote (from a company with the same name) and Microsoft OneNote. They both do a great job of creating a digital knowledge base for all kinds of information and content you want to keep track of. They will allow you to store text, photos, web clippings, and audio and video recordings. Evernote offers a free service along with a premium version for $5 a month or $45 a year. OneNote costs $99 and offers a free, 60-day trial.

With Evernote, you can download the application on your desktop, use the web version or download the application to your iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry, Palm Pre and Windows Mobile phones. OneNote supports a desktop application in addition to an application for Windows Mobile phones.

There's also Google Notebook, a free application that allows you to browse, clip and organize information from across the web. In addition, individual wikis are also available.

I have been using Evernote on and off for some time now. It can increase your personal productivity in many ways. With the product's one-year anniversary this month and the introduction of new features, I decided to focus this column on how it can make entrepreneurs more productive at work:

• Research companion. As you surf the web, you may come across a certain piece of content that could be useful. You can clip only the piece you are interested in and store that in an appropriate notebook in Evernote. You can tag the clipping with the relevant indexes. And you can add a little explanatory text to document your thoughts on that piece. All your web clippings will be available to you at any time in the future. They are searchable using the specified tags or using the text within the clippings. Evernote also keeps track of the original link in case you need to go back to it for further reference.
   
• Capturing conference slides and whiteboards. When you're in a conference and the speaker puts up a slide with lots of text and images, or when you're in a meeting where people are writing on the whiteboard, you don't have to copy all that information. You can simply take a picture with your mobile phone--or a regular camera--and upload that to Evernote. The system will automatically run text recognition on the image so you can search for the image later using the words Evernote has recognized. I have tried uploading images of both printed and handwritten material. The text recognition works OK. It's not perfect, especially if your image quality is not great. But keep in mind that the original image is saved in your database, so you can look it up yourself if you need to reference it later. The images are geo-tagged as well in case you forget where the meetings took place.
   
• Collaboration over shared notebooks. Sharing is a new Evernote feature that can come in handy when working with others on the team. You can create a notebook on a project and allow others to view its contents. You can even allow them to modify the contents of the notebook. Only paid subscribers can grant modification access to others. But only the person who grants access needs the premium access.
   
• Capturing real-time insights: Having Evernote available on several mobile phone models really expands the accessibility of its services. I especially like being able to speak my thoughts into an Evernote phone application that captures them as audio clips I can tag and listen to later. There is an independent and complementary Jott application that works well with Evernote. Jott can transcribe the audio clips and automatically e-mail them to Evernote. This service used to be free but is now fee-based.
   
• Ubiquitous access to your important files: With Evernote, you can include many different file types in your notebooks, in addition to text, images, audio and web clips. If you have a free subscription, this will include PDF files only. Premium subscribers can also store Excel, PowerPoint, Word and other file types. So even when you're not at your desk, you can have access to your important files with only an internet connection. This can also be useful for backing up and restoring your important files.
   
• Tame the nasty pileup of receipts and business cards: If you have a collection of business cards or receipts that are occupying a dark corner of your desk and multiplying, you can use Evernote to clean up the clutter. You can use a scanner and upload the scanned images to Evernote. Once uploaded, Evernote will use text recognition to properly classify the scanned images, so you can easily look up the information later. If you'd like someone else to do the scanning grunt work for you, check out an independent paid service: Shoeboxed. You mail your pile of receipts or business cards to Shoeboxed, which scans them for you and can send the scans directly to Evernote.

Evernote has made its application programming interface available to other developers. So we expect to see many cool new applications that can complement Evernote's growing functionality.

Gotcha's: Each Evernote entry is limited to 25 MB in size. So long videos can't be tracked in Evernote. Free subscription allows for 40 MB worth of new entries each month vs. 500 MB for the premium version. But once the entries are in the database, Evernote promises to keep them there forever.

Bottom line: Digital note-taking is a great way of collecting and managing various pieces of information that can increase your personal and business productivity. Evernote is a popular tool that runs on desktop, web and several models of smartphone. Similar to any other productivity tool, you need to spend enough time to build a practice around it that best suits your needs.