Episode 130
The Evernote Show
March 2, 2018 · Mike Murphy
EP130: THE EVERNOTE SHOW All about the very popular note-taking app, Evernote. Episode Summary: What is Evernote? How does it work and what can it do? Why has it taken me 10 years to finally start using it consistently? How do I use it?
Episode Summary: A deep dive into Evernote — what it is, why it took 10 years to finally click as a productivity tool, and the simple organization system that made it stick.
What You’ll Learn
- What Evernote is, what it costs, and how it compares to similar note-taking apps
- Why it took 10 years of on-and-off use before Evernote finally clicked
- The simple 3-notebook organization system that finally made it work
- Why Evernote’s real power is search and tags, not elaborate folder structures
This episode is for you if: you’ve never used Evernote, you have an account but it hasn’t clicked yet, or you’re already a power user curious how someone else structures their workflow.
What Is Evernote?
Evernote is a Silicon Valley company that officially launched in 2007, going public in 2008-2009, with roughly 200 million users by 2018. Plans at the time: Basic (free forever), Plus ($35/year, Mike’s plan), and Premium ($70/year).
Similar or complementary tools: Apple Notes, Bear, Todoist, Trello, and Google Drive.
When Did Mike Join Evernote?
Mike created his account in January 2009 as a beta user, and started and stopped using it at least 20 times since — always liked the idea, but could never quite make it stick.
What Does Evernote Do?
Evernote is the Swiss Army knife of productivity tools — a note-taking and list-making app, an organizer, and an archive, functioning like a filing cabinet for your digital brain, accessible from anywhere. It’s built around capturing ideas and saving digital information: webpage articles, photos, emails, quotes, pretty much anything.
What it’s not: a backup system like Dropbox or Google Drive. Evernote makes virtual copies of what you upload for viewing and sharing, but doesn’t store the original files.
Primary Uses
Creating and sharing notes; taking or uploading and marking up photos; recording voice memos; scanning business cards and paper documents; and building to-do lists with checkboxes and reminders.
Evernote 101: Getting Started
Sign up free at Evernote.com, download the desktop app (Mac or Windows) and mobile app (iOS or Android). Tap the green plus icon to create a new note — text or voice memo — and add photos, PDFs, audio, attachments, or annotations inside it.
Notes live in Notebooks, synced in real time across devices, whether typed, dictated, or clipped from the web. At the time, the free plan capped notes at 250, with unlimited tags. Think of Evernote as the word “capture” — a place to offload the constant flow of information so your brain gets a break.
Why It Took 10 Years to Love Evernote
Mike always loved the technology and design — beautiful UI, seamless sync, affordable, right up there with Gmail and Dropbox as favorite tools. But it never actually helped. It became a “digital cemetery”: once something went in, it was never seen again. The complicated organization systems in tutorials he watched felt like too much overhead. Still, he never deleted the account, sensing there was a workflow he hadn’t found yet.
Why Start Again in 2018?
Feeling disorganized and unable to process the volume of information being read and learned online, Mike needed a system to track tools and resources for teaching others. The real problem all along was overthinking the organization — once a genuinely simple system clicked, Evernote became the new digital brain and filing cabinet.
How Evernote Actually Gets Used
The power is in search and tags, not an elaborate notebook hierarchy — everything is searchable, Gmail-level good.
Personally: scans of every important document (passports, insurance cards, library card), a running list of everything in the wallet with credit card numbers for fast replacement if lost or stolen, plus memories and anything else worth keeping.
For business: researching topics and curating content — a good After Effects tutorial, a useful PDF or cheat sheet, affiliate links, frequently recommended tools and resources. Podcast, tutorial, and content ideas all live here too, solving the stress of not having a topic library to pull from.
How It’s Organized
- Digital clean-up. A few hours spent deleting 10 years of saved documents no longer needed, keeping only the essentials, and wiping old notebooks and tags to start fresh.
- Inbox. One default notebook everything flows into — kept mostly empty, functioning like a to-do list of things still needing review or tagging.
- Stacks (optional). Groups of notebooks — Learn (the main resource filing cabinet), Create (notes and current projects), and Move Forward (goals and bucket list).
Recap
Evernote is free to join, with paid upgrades available once regular use kicks in. It works across iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac, built for creating notes and organizing digital information in many formats — not a file backup system, just virtual copies for viewing and sharing. Its real power is search and tags rather than a perfect folder structure.