It’s not too late to set new business goals for 2017. In fact, with the hectic holidays behind us, now is a great time to focus on what you hope to achieve this year.
One of my goals is to learn new ways to use Evernote for productivity. It’s already my go-to app for clipping web articles and organizing them into notebooks. But the cross-platform, freemium service is capable of much more. So I asked Evernote power users for tips on how to get better organized in 2017, using Evernote. Here’s a set of clever, and sometimes unexpected, ways to use Evernote tags, notebooks, table of contents and other tools to streamline your workflows.
You can write your goals in Evernote and share them with others, according to Joshua Zerkel, Evernote’s director of global community. “When you share goals with the people who can help support you, you’re letting them know you’ve decided to make important changes and they can help encourage you. ”
“It’s important to set goals to see how you’re doing throughout the quarter and year,” Zerkel says. After you write goals down as Evernote notes, you should collectively share them in a notebook with others. “This helps keep team members accountable and offers more collaboration to assist others in meeting their goals (like other members on my community team). ”
Here’s a quick primer on how to share notes.
When interviewing job candidates, take notes that include key points the applicant makes, as well as follow-up action items, says Nicholas Kinports, executive vice president of strategy for NOTICE , a social content agency. “This helps me track what we’re expecting to receive from the candidate and if the response matches the discussion,” he says.
You can also add the candidates’ PDF resumes to notes, which are keyword-searchable (a $70-a-year Evernote Premium account is required to search PDFs), as well as offer letters. And you can share the notes with colleagues, too, for additional input. Keeping candidate notes helps you make better hiring decisions and can come in handy in the future, if you meet a former candidate again, Kinports says.
Here’s how to save PDFs to Evernote .
Evernote templates are a big time-saver and can help you be consistent in your interactions with clients, according to Melissa Ward, managing partner of website-design and digital-marketing firm NewWard Development. They can also help you remember what you need to do during those interactions.
Ward created an Evernote notebook called “Templates,” which includes forms for client intake, marketing personas, blog posts and a marketing calendar. “When I want to create a new client intake note, I go to the needed template, do a ‘select all,’ create a new note in my client notebook, and paste the template in there. ” The template prompts her on what to ask new clients, and she shares the notes with clients so they can add information, as well.
