Morbean

I consider myself to be a reliable person, I always try to be early and being late brings me out in a rash. That all sounds great. Dependable, punctual, organised. The problem is I am unbelievably forgetful. I once got told by an optician that my dry, red eyes were a result of me forgetting to blink. She actually told me to “try and remember to blink”.

For me to be a reliable, professional person I have a number of systems to get me through the day. The most trusted of these methods I have done all of my life - I write on my hand. This however has some downfalls; the limited copy area means I often write in abbreviations or shorthand which I can’t decipher later. I have destroyed pillow cases and bed sheets and woken up with backwards writing on my head, arms and chest where my notes have been circulated in my slumber and it is very dependent on having a decent pen on you at all times. I write on Post-It notes, pads, sketch books, receipts and any scraps of paper I can find. Then I forget where I put them. My MacBook is littered with notes, doubley so since my acquisition of an iPhone last year meant I could make notes from bed in sleepless nights without a light or a pen. Genius. I forget I have written most of these notes.

Recently I revisited the free organisational web tool Evernote. A colleague actually showed me this product a few years ago but at the time I couldn’t see it’s relevance to my lifestyle. Since then I have hugely increased organisational responsibilities running my own design agency so I thought I’d give it a try.

Evernote is a nice little app that syncs all of your devices so that you can access you notebooks anywhere. These notebooks are compilations of related, tagged notes that can be typed, screen grabs, photographs or sound bytes. The search function will even search for work in images (photos, screen grabs or even handwriting) meaning finding notes you forgot you wrote couldn’t be easier.

Since my re-introduction to Evernote I have used it for collating research on all of the web design projects I have worked on since. I have recommended it to friends, family and colleagues. I think it’s great. But I still use my Notes app, I still write on anything that a biro can get purchase on and I still decorate my hand, and as such, my body, legs, duvet, towels and even one of my wife’s buttocks with illegible blue scrawl.

Evernote. A tidy, organised place for all the things you’ve forgotten.