Digitize Your Life — Reducing Paperwork and Clutter with Evernote

6 min readAug 22, 2016

I am a big fan of Evernote and have been using it for years, both personally and professionally. In this article, I’m going to provide you with an overview of how you can use Evernote to reduce paperwork and clutter and easily capture important information for future use.

I’m always looking for ways to simplify my life and to be efficient with my time. I like to have the information I need at my fingertips, always accessible. Whether it is an insurance card, car registration, passport number, appliance repair receipt or eye glasses prescription, I want to be able to find it quickly and easily!

Evernote is a powerful software tool designed to capture, organize and provide easy access to all your information. It allows users to easily share information, collaborate and manage projects. Storing and finding your information in Evernote is easy. Evernote can handle many types of file formats — PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations, photographs, images, and text to name just a few.

There are many ways to get your information into Evernote. Michael Hyatt has written an excellent article on the subject that covers 10 different ways to capture your information. In this article, I’m going to focus on a few of my favorites — scanning, photographing, emailing and web clipping.

Scanning

There are two different scanning methods:

Using a desktop scanner
Using a mobile app

Desktop Scanning

My Evernote ScanSnap scanner has become an indispensable tool. In fact, I use it so much that I have 2 of them — one at the office and one at home that I share with my wife. A day rarely passes when I don’t use the ScanSnap scanner. Evernote will work with just about any scanner but I find the Evernote ScanSnap scanner to be reliable and easy to set up and use. The Evernote ScanSnap scanner is able to detect the type of document you are scanning and file it accordingly. For example, you can load a stack of printed documents, receipts, photos and business cards all at the same time and Evernote will scan each item and file it accordingly; business cards to the Business Cards notebook, receipts to the Receipts notebook, etc.

Here is a great video that shows the ScanSnap Evernote Scanner in action.

One great benefit of scanning documents into Evernote is that Evernote performs an OCR (optical character recognition) scan on your files so that the text from scans and photos is searchable in Evernote. For example, below is a screenshot of a printed document that I scanned into Evernote using my ScanSnap scanner. The text of the document is searchable, thanks to Evernote’s OCR feature, so if I wanted to find this document in Evernote, I could search “collaboration” (or any words in the document) to easily find it.

Note that Evernote highlights my search term(s)

Mobile App Scanning

You can also use any one of a number of mobile scanning apps. My favorite is Scannable. CNET rated Scannable as their favorite iOS scanning app. For Android, CNET rated CamScanner as their top choice. Evernote is compatible with most scanning apps so if you already have a favorite, it will most likely work.

Using the ScanSnap app on my iPhone, I scanned a copy of this brochure. Just like with the scan from the ScanSnap scanner, the Evernote servers run an OCR scan on the brochure so that all of the text becomes searchable. When I go into Evernote and search “World Bicycle Relief”, it will locate my note with the brochure and highlight the search terms.

Photographing

Getting photographs into Evernote is really easy. The Evernote mobile app has a built-in camera! Or you can use your phone’s camera to send a photograph directly to Evernote.

I have gotten in the habit of photographing all my receipts in Evernote. I never leave a restaurant or store with a paper receipt. My business receipts go into a notebook titled Business Receipts — 2016 and my personal receipts go into a notebook titled Receipts. Again, the photographed receipts are scanned by the Evernote servers so that all the text is searchable. Need to find a receipt from Best Buy for a hard drive that crashed 6 months after you purchased it? Simply search “Best Buy” to find it. Try finding that receipt in a file folder!

There are two additional apps that I use for quickly getting information into Evernote. Essentially, these apps are just shortcuts. One is a camera for Evernote (FastEver Snap) and the other is for a text notes (FastEver). I keep them right next to my Evernote app on my home screen so that I can quickly photograph a receipt or document or start a new text note to jot down information. These apps are completely optional. I like them because they provide me with one-touch access to photograph a receipt or jot a note.

Emailing

In order to be able to email content into Evernote, you will need to have a Plus, Premium or Evernote Business subscription (basic users with free accounts do not have access to this feature). For a comparison on the different Evernote plans, click here.

Evernote allows users to forward emails directly into Evernote. When you sign up for an Evernote account, you are automatically assigned an Evernote email address. I created a contact in my contacts database with my Evernote email address and titled it “Evernote”. This makes it easy to simply forward an email directly into Evernote.

For example, I recently purchased a new iPhone. Apple emailed me my receipt and when it arrived in my inbox, I forwarded the email receipt to my Evernote account. Bam! It’s in Evernote. I can then file it in a notebook, tag it, or simply leave it in my Evernote inbox. I usually add a title to the note and drag it to a notebook called Electronics where I keep information on all my electronic devices.

I also frequently forward work related emails to Evernote. For example, I may be doing research on a company and receive an email with some useful information. I can quickly forward that email into Evernote and keep it with the rest of my research and notes. Sometimes I will just use copy/paste. Both work well.

Web Clipping

Evernote Web Clipper is a helpful browser extension that allows you to easily download (clip) the contents of a web pages directly into Evernote. Web Clipper is available for Chrome, Safari, IE 7+, Firefox, Opera and Microsoft Edge.

Recently I had to do some research on database contact management software. I searched the web and found a wide variety of programs. As I sorted through all the options, I used the Evernote Web Clipper to easily capture web pages that looked like a good fit for my needs. I also found a great comparison chart and some helpful reviews that I clipped. Once I had clipped all the web pages into Evernote, I reviewed my options, edited the clips, and added some notes to share with my partners. At our weekly partner meeting, I used Evernote’s presentation mode to share my recommendations with my partners.

These are just a few of the ways that you can easily capture information into Evernote. As you start to digitize more and more of your information, you might find that you have a lot less paperwork and clutter on you desk. And as you will likely start to think of additional ways you can use Evernote to digitize your life and reduce clutter. I’ll have more ideas as well as some specific applicatons in future articles.

Frank is a consultant to SMBs focusing on improving operational performance by creating systems, workflows and processes that improve efficiency, reduce costs, ensure consistency and institutionalize knowledge. Frank is a Certified Evernote Consultant.

Contact me (frank.evernote@gmail.com) to learn more about Evernote for Business

Other Articles — Board Collaboration with Evernote