I’ve never had much luck with my short term memory.  Long term I’m usually okay, but when something fleeting jumps into my mind I’ve always had trouble remembering it later.

Since I decided a few months ago to give Evernote a fair trial, which meant that I’d sort of force myself to use it, I figured there had to be something that I could do with it.  Turns out that tags and email make keeping up with quick thoughts much easier.

What I’ve started doing is anytime I have an idea for a blog or forum post is to create a new note and tag it with “Post Ideas.”  After I’ve written the post a “done” tag gets added but the Post Ideas tag stays.  I have a saved search query of ‘tag:”Post Ideas” -tag:done’ which returns all of the notes that are tagged with Post Ideas but not tagged with done, which is all the ones I still need to look at.  Seems to be working pretty well for me.  In fact, this post is the second one I entered into Evernote this way.  As soon as Publish gets clicked I can go over and add the done tag and move on :)

The other feature I’ve started using is the email gateway.  When you create an Evernote account they set you up with an email address that you can use to send notes to yourself.  Occasionally I get  emails that I need to remember, but flagging for follow up never has worked well for me.  So I’ve started forwarding these emails to my Evernote address.  With a saved query ‘source:mail.smtp’ it’s easy to come back to them later.

If you’re looking for more, Evernote has a good list of all the search options on their web page.

And of course I always have my iPhone with me so the Evernote iPhone App works as well.  It also has the advantage of tracking where I am when I create a note.  But the little keyboard makes it tough to enter much.  Plus, there’s no rich text support so I can’t keep bulleted lists.