I love Evernote. It’s one of the must-have apps for all my hardware. If you’re not used to it, you can’t imagine how handy it is. Take a look at their website, but to be honest, it doesn’t begin to cover the range and depth of how handy it is to presenters.
I make no claim that this blog is comprehensive, either. Heck I don’t even claim I’ve remembered everything I use Evernote for! If it helps you get a bit more productive, that’s all I can hope for.
The obvious advantages for presenters
Some things shouldn’t need to be gone over, but I will 😉
Presentation mode
It’s not as great a presentation tool. It’s not as good as, say, Keynote (or even PowerPoint), but it exists. It’s simple and means you can make presentations pretty much from any device without having to pay out for something like Keynote or Prezi. Truth to tell though, as pretty much everyone I know has one of those two packages already, and as things like Google has free online software, the use of this little trick is a bit limited. But for what it’s worth, it works nicely
Presentation research
Now we really get into our stride!
I can’t speak for other browsers, but the add-on for Google’s Chrome browser is an astonishingly handy tool for finding what you need and putting it all into one place. Once the plugin is up and running (simplicity itself), a simple click will allow you to save any interesting page’s content in a number of ways. Saving the article is great but my personal favourite is to save the ‘simplified article’. Essentially this magically creates a note in Evernote with the contents of the page you’re looking at, but with a pretty good job of cutting out all the extraneous stuff that’s just there to confuse you, make you buy things, get you to look at other pages, etc. The beauty of this little trick is that what you get is what you need – side bars and adverts aren’t included in your Evernote note. I can’t say how much time and irritation that trick has saved me.
Of course, if you want to save a screen (or part of it) as an image to include in your presentation that option’s right there for you too. (Note: I’m not saying this is always a good idea, for legal reasons, or because the resolution might not be what you’d need for a good projection but sometimes it’s all you can get – if you’re showing the interface of new software, for example.)
Synching
It sort of goes without saying that a note-taking app that syncs across all your devises, by magic, is cool, right? Research I’ve done on my big ol’ desktop back in the office magically appears on my laptop for me when I’m in the hotel bedroom (or bar) to spend an hour working on my presentation. (NOTE: Not the presentation I’m due to give the next day – the one that I’m researching for weeks ahead! Honest.)
The less obvious advantages
As an independent presentation skills trainer and professional speaker, my life takes more administration than a ‘traditional’ one does. I need to be in lots of different places, with lots of different combinations of kit, doing lots of different things. This is where Evernote shines in the way you’d expect – as a note-taking app it’s without peer. Using the folders I can organise my notes into notebooks (such as “Travel and tickets”) which contains notes containing various checklists for different journeys etc. The beauty of this this that after a training session or a speaking gig I can update the checklist while things are still hot in my head, knowing that they’ll be available everywhere else in a matter of minutes.
My personal approach to this is to just get it down in any old format while things are in my head. I have a notebook for just that. Once I’m back in the office I copy/paste/tidy-up from those notes I make on the road. There’s no great scientific reason for this – it’s just that I find it sooooo much quicker to type and edit on a big computer screen than on my iPhone that it’s worth waiting until I’m back in the office (or at least on a laptop in a hotel room) to edit.
Taking venue pictures is a handy little trick, too. For me, knowing what a venue looks like is a real bonus. YMMV of course, but for me it’s great. So here’s my trick… every time I visit a new venue it gets photographed to Evernote. The geotagging and auto-dating is great, of course, and I add the client in a tag. The result is that if ever I’m back in the area I know what I’m walking into. You’d be surprised by how often clients bring me back to the same venue but without this, I can’t see how I’d ever organise my records.
Oh, and I add a couple of notes to the pic, such as any key names (like the AVtech’s name!) and sneaky tricks like a comment on the nearest free, long term car park. I know, I know… it doesn’t sound like much, but it makes life a lot easier, believe me!
Presentation blog ideas
… such as this one… 😉
To be honest, this one isn’t really special to what I do; whatever you do, this is just using Evernote as the awesome note-taking app that it is. Having it on my iPhone means I can capture and idea very easily, perhaps using text-to-speech to get a quick start on a blog that gets edited and expanded back in the office.
Odd things I’ve done with Evernote
Some of these things won’t surprise you at all. Others might.
Presentation research and researching my book
Pretty clearly, a book like Presentation Genius, which references nearly 400 pieces of research took a lot of research. I did the vast bulk of it, but I have to admit I had help – I hired research assistants for a few days at a time to start the research process off. Their brief was to carry out literature searches on topics I gave them and return to me anything that they thought was interesting; anything they thought was potentially 
interesting; and anything related to those things. (Yes, the result was that I had a lot of reading to do that ended up not being used for the book but better that way around than missing something, right?) Three little bits of Evernote were handy here:
- syncing – research could be carried out on any device and available on any device
- team access – some of the notebooks I hold for Evernote could be accessed by other people so there was no fuss about passing information around
- the web browser clipper – this got references into place with clicks of a mouse only
I’ve not done a formal assessment, but I guess that the impact of Evernote on the book was that it saved me a couple of hundred hours of effort over not using it (or a similar tool). That’s a guess though, but even if I’m badly out you can see how handy it was!
I also drafted chapters in Evernote, so that time in hotel rooms wasn’t wasted and the resulting work was available to everyone else in the team – mainly my wife and my proof-reader 🙂
My drum lessons
I’m not a drummer but I’m learning the Djembe. (The big, cool west African drum) Like a lot of people I think in very western ways for my rhythms but a lot of what I need to do is totally different. Simply getting out my iPhone in my lesson and creating an audio note of my teacher getting it right meant that when I practiced I’d got him in my pocket (metaphorically!). Oh, and yes, before you ask, I took that picture of my Djembe and sync’d it to this computer using Evernote 🙂
It’s one of the reasons I use Evernote so much – the various types of note taking you can get your information into is pretty darn cool.
Recording and sharing presentation rehearsals
Obvious, right?
I also use Evernote to occasionally share feedback and comments – and videos of suggest different ways of doing things for clients. There are other tools for doing this, of course, probably better tools, to be honest, but I find the convenience of having everything in one place worth the slight downs.
