A few weeks ago, I showed you how to manage your schedule with Google Calendar.  Now that we have your calendar sorted out, let’s talk about those pieces of paper you’ve got scattered all over your desk, your kitchen counter, or wherever you stick them.

Does at least one surface in your life look anything like this?

Photo Credit: Mack Male Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Image recolored and cropped.

If so, you could really benefit from a wonderful online tool called Evernote.

Think of Evernote like a 3-ring binder you keep online. Like a Trapper Keeper for the 21st century. In an Evernote account, you can store all of these things:

• Notes you type directly into the program
• Handwritten notes — just snap a picture and upload a handwritten note straight to your Evernote account
• Uploaded files (including Word documents, PDFs, image files, etc.)
• Web pages — go to any web page and save a screenshot, a simplified version of the web page, or the whole dang page as is

Once you save notes, you can organize them into nice, neat notebooks and put groups of notebooks into nice, neat stacks, turning those piles of paper into clean, digital, searchable files. And because Evernote is cloud-based, you can access it through your desktop computer, tablet, smartphone, or anything that has Internet access. You get an idea when you’re standing in line at the grocery store? You can plop it into Evernote right then and there. Did someone post a paper schedule of events that you want to remember? Snap a photo and file it in Evernote. Start using this tool on a regular basis and watch those piles of paper disappear.

Evernote for Teachers

For teachers, Evernote could be used in a variety of ways:

• Keep ideas for future lessons, along with links to materials and research articles
• Store notes from faculty and department meetings, along with essential forms or links to relevant websites
• Organize resources and materials for professional development, including images of those brochures and flyers you don’t know what to do with
• Maintain notes on student progress, behavior, or even keep a reflective journal of your own teaching
• Manage other aspects of your life, such as lists of gift ideas, travel plans and documents, research on health and wellness, or whatever else you might normally store in your “Documents” folder

Evernote can do a whole lot more than I describe here, but that’s the basic gist of it.

Ready to see it in action? Watch this tutorial:

Next up  in my summer organization series, I will be showing you how to organize your digital files with Google Drive. Until then, happy getting-your-crap-together! ♥