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During my first year in college, I discovered – among many other things – an amazing app called Evernote.

It would only be slightly hyperbolic to say that Evernote is my second brain. Sure, it’s lacking in neurons and glia – but more than any other app or system, Evernote serves as an ultimate repository for information I want to remember.

Evernote is almost always open on my computer, and it’s a frequently visited app on my phone as well. I use it for everything – brainstorming and writing new articles, developing questions for podcast guests, keeping software licenses, tracking lists of Magic cards, etc.

In school, Evernote was just as indispensable as it is now – and today I’m going to show you six ways I used it to make my classes easier.

1. Take Fast, Organized Notes on Your Laptop

“Use Evernote as the place you put everything Don’t ask yourself which device it’s on—it’s in Evernote” – The New York Times “When it comes to taking all manner of notes and getting work done, Evernote is an indispensable tool.” – PC Mag-CAPTURE IDEAS. It's obviously been done before (OneNote, Notability) but I would rather have both the note taking aspects and the organization that Evernote also has which are wonderful features - COMBINED. It is so annoying to have one app for note taking and an app like Evernote and have to BUY AND SYNC two different apps. Practically anyone who has ever looked into note-taking apps has come across Evernote—which tops the list. This powerful tool lets you organize notes into notebooks, which can be synced across as many as two devices. All free accounts also get 60 MB of space for uploading files to the cloud.

The paper vs. laptop debate has raged on for years, and will probably never stop as long as paper still exists…

…but when all paper notebooks are engulfed in flames someday, while my notes are in the cloud with triple-redundant backups on servers in Argentina, the moon, and 8721 AMOS (possibly my favorite asteroid, but I’m pretty fickle with my minor celestial body favoritism), I will have the last laugh.

In all seriousness, though, taking notes was the main use I had for Evernote while in school. Since I can type a lot faster than I can write, I was able to take detailed, high-quality notes on my laptop in the classes where I actually cared to take them.

Getting good at the keyboard shortcuts (here’s a giant list of them) means you can quickly created nested lists, bold or italicize key terms, and structure your notes easily on the fly. It also means that your notes stay nice and legible for the entire duration of your class. I don’t know about you, but when I hand-write my notes, they tend to degrade in quality over time.

Keeping your notes in Evernote will also help you keep them much more organized and searchable. If you just take notes in Word or another text editor, you end up with either one obnoxiously long note for your entire class, or a bunch of unwieldy files that have to be named and organized manually.

Aside: Since there are still lots of files you’ll have to organize outside of Evernote, take some time to learn how to organize them the right way.

On the other hand, keeping organized in Evernote is as easy as making a notebook for each course, and then creating a new note for each day in class inside that notebook.

2. Link To and Pull In Outside Data as You Take Notes

Sometimes your teacher will present a concept in class, but they won’t give you quite as much detail as you’d like during the actual lecture. I remember this happening a lot in my finance class, where I’d often need to go over concepts more slowly to fully understand them at first.

If you’re taking notes on paper, you can star these concepts or make side-notes like “Research more on this later”.

However, if you’re taking notes in Evernote, you can easily hop over to your browser, Google the concept, and then create a hyperlink to whatever you find right inside your notes.

Or, instead of just creating a link, you can use the Evernote Web Clipper to clip an entire article into your notebook, then link to that note within your current note.

My information systems notes are full of these kinds of links, and they definitely helped when I would get home and review the notes I’d taken in class.

3. Scan Your Paper Notes and Make Them Searchable

I know that some people are die-hards for the old-fashioned and will never let go of paper notes. I also realize that some classes don’t easily lend themselves to notes taken on a keyboard – math notes being a prime example.

When I took my statistics class, I actually took all my notes on paper. The speed boost of a keyboard is kind of trashed when you have to write down lots of complex symbols that don’t fit well on single lines. So really, I get you.

Also, Evernote has you covered as well. By simply taking a picture of your notes with your phone, you can gain all the organizational benefits Evernote offers for your paper notes as well. As someone who took paper notes in a few classes and laptop notes in others, I definitely appreciated being able to have them all in one organized place.

Of course, this lets you do all the basics with your paper notes – tag them, date them, link to research materials, etc.

But there’s one huge benefit that goes beyond those basic capabilities. Evernote actually makes your handwriting searchable.

This is mind-bogglingly helpful when you’ve got 60 pages of notes at the end of a semester and you’re trying to study for a cumulative final.

Need to find your notes about a specific vocab term? Just type it into that top bar. No more flipping though your notebooks looking for that one page with the Spider-man drawing and the formula for Bayes’ Theorem on it.

4. Create Brain-Dumps Before Writing Papers

I recently got an email from a student, who said his biggest challenge as a student is:

“Procrastination, especially when writing essays.“

He’s not the first to say it, and he won’t be the last. The truth is, writing papers can really suck. They’re especially awful when they’re assigned in class and have a page-count goal; however, even as a full-time writer, I often get stuck and procrastinate when trying to finish my own articles.

The big problem is that we self-censor when writing. If you’re not in the “flow state”, then writing can be a painful exercise that basically goes like this:

• Type a few words
• Decide they’re crap; delete them
• Repeat until you decide to go watch Adventure Time

When I sit down to a blank page and simply try to write an article from scratch, I often have this problem. It’s just hard to avoid self-censoring.

That’s why I do a brain-dump in Evernote for each article I write – before I actually write it.

Essentially, I’ll just create a new note with a tentative title for an article idea I have in my Blog Posts notebook. Then I’ll just dump all my thoughts about that topic into a huge bullet list.

I’ll also paste in any quotes I think would go well in the article, and link to other articles I might want to pull ideas from.

Only after I’ve done my brain-dump do I start actually writing with a final product in mind. At this point, I’ve got a solid list of ideas to run through, so all my brain has to do is think about how to word them all nicely.

Try this technique the next time you’re assigned a paper to write; you’ll probably find the writing process much less painful.

5. Study from Anywhere with Your Phone or Tablet

In addition to making it really easy in create and organize notes and other content, Evernote is great for studying those notes as well.

I’ll be completely honest here; I really didn’t study all that much in college. While I did take notes, do a good amount of my reading assignments, and always did my homework, I was pretty bad when it came to actually sitting down and reviewing material.

However, I was pretty amazing at test-day cramming. Since I had the Evernote app on my phone, I was able to review all my notes easily while on the bus and while waiting for the testing room to open. While cramming isn’t the best strategy for learning things, it actually did help me out a bit.

Evernote has mobile apps for pretty much every platform, so if you have a smartphone, you can do this too.

If you have an iPad, you can also use Evernote Peek to turn your notes into flashcards.

With Peek, you can create a notebook of notes you’d like to study. Each note’s title will be the question on the flashcard, and the note body is the answer.

Once you’ve created some notes and loaded them in, you can use the iPad’s smart cover to quiz yourself.

Honestly, I prefer Anki when it comes to learning via flashcards (Martin wrote a great review you should read), but this is another cool option you can check out.

6. Save Online Quiz Results for Later Study

Those frequent quizzes you have to take on Blackboard? Usually they’re prime study material.

However, sometimes you can’t access your results after you’ve viewed them the first time. Even when you can , it’s a pain to go through all those menus to find each one.

Instead, just copy your quiz results into a new note in Evernote. That way, they’re available for you to study whenever you like.

Caveat: I’m note responsible if you copy material that’s not supposed to be copied. If it’s actual exam results you’re viewing (rather than a casual, homework-style quiz), ask your professor if it’s cool to do this first. Or don’t. I’m not your dad.

Boom.

Now you’re armed to the teeth with Evernote tactics that’ll help you dominate your classes – and probably the rest of your life as well.

Here are a few out-of-class use cases where Evernote has been extremely helpful for me:

• Noting details about on-campus jobs – employee office locations, development server addresses, and other hard-to-remember stuff all went into job-specific notebooks
• Saving biographies and other personal statements that are useful when applying for scholarships, writing bios, and trying to make yourself more hireable
• Collecting travel info – when I went to Japan the first time, my Travel notebook was indispensable for saving flight details, lists of hostels and places I wanted to visit, etc.
• Getting ideas out of your head – I have way too many ideas, so it’s helpful to sock them away in Evernote so they don’t take my focus away from current projects

What other tricks do you use to make Evernote better? Let me know in the comments, yo.

In previous post, we compare Notion to Evernote and the web clipper and document scanner features make Evernote standout. Then, how about making a comparison between Evernote and OneNote? In this Evernote vs OneNote post, we compare these two popular note-taking apps in note taking, web clipping, team work, storage and pricing to see which one of them will improve your productivity.

Read More:

Evernote Cornell Note Taking

Contents

Evernote vs OneNote: Overview

Evernote vs OneNote: Popularity Comparison

Evernote Note Taking Templates

Evernote vs OneNote: Note Taking

The whole point of a note-taking app is simplicity and organization. Without it, you’re better off handwriting all your notes in a book!

OneNote and Evernote are available for all the major desktop and mobile OSes, they can each sync your notes to all of your devices and the web, and both promise to be the only note-taking app you need.

Microsoft OneNote features the traditional Microsoft Office Ribbon that provides you with many features to create, edit, view, and organize notes. While creating notes, you can add text, images, tables, videos, audio files, spreadsheets, links, and more to your notes. This helps you create content-rich notes and keep all media associated with them in one place.

Evernote includes most of the same note-creation features, like drawing and editing tools, but doesn’t provide some OneNote features like reviewing other users’ edits. Also, unless you tag your notes, they will keep piling up in an unorganized manner, and it will be difficult to search for them later.

Winner: OneNote

Evernote vs OneNote: Web Clipping

Different from Notion, both Evernote and OneNote have a web clipper.

OneNote offers a browser add-on called the OneNote Web Clipper for Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox. Note that you need to sign in to the extension with a Microsoft account to use it. Using this clipper, you can grab a screenshot of a webpage or other content.

Evernote’s web-clipping tool is exemplary. The tool runs as a browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Opera.

Winner: Evernote

Evernote vs OneNote: OCR

Evernote and OneNote have optical character recognition, meaning they can read text contained in images or other static documents, such as PDFs. When it comes down to leveraging OCR, you can do more with OneNote than with Evernote.

OneNote makes all the text in images searchable, and it lets you extract the text from images and other supported files so that you can paste it elsewhere and edit it.

Evernote doesn’t have the ability to extract text from images, but it does search the text found in uploaded images, PDFs, and Office documents.

Winner: OneNote

Evernote Manual

Evernote vs OneNote: Team Work

Do you have a team to delegate with on a project? we’ll take a look at sharing notes with others and co-editing options.

Evernote has a handful of features that support collaboration. Among them, you can share any notebook by right-clicking on it and selecting “share notebook.” Input the email addresses of those with whom you want to share your notebook and select the type of access permissions you want to grant them: view, edit or edit and invite. Plus, you can generate note links, which will let anybody view a note in a browser. Or if you prefer, you can just email a note to someone straight from within the app. Finally, Evernote has a handy chat feature that can be used to discuss notes.

Like Evernote, you can share any notebook in OneNote by clicking the share icon near the top-right side of the app, then inputting the email addresses of those with whom you want to share. View or edit permissions can be granted. However, there’s no chat option like you get with Evernote and no option to comment on notes within the app.

Winner: Evernote

Evernote vs OneNote: Storage and Pricing

Last but not least, is the pricing difference between them.

The free version of OneNote offers up to 5 GB of cloud storage, which is across all the software of each OneDrive account. This 5gb will be shared across the online Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and every other software solution including OneNote of course. After that, you will have to subscribe to the pro plan. Microsoft’s basic plan, which offers 50GB of OneDrive storage, costs just $1.99 per month or $23.88 annually. For $6.99 per month, or $69.99 per year, you get 1,000GB of storage and access to Office 365 Personal edition.

The basic version of Evernote is free, but it limits you to adding 60MB of new notes a month, lets you sync between only two devices, and doesn’t include advanced features. Evernote has three paid plans, Basic, Premium ($7.99), and Business ($14.99). Advanced features that help you convert your notes to presentations, search for content in inserted attachments or PDF files in notes, and more are available in the Evernote Premium and Evernote Business versions. Premium accounts get 10GB per month. Business accounts get 20GB per month plus an additional 2GB per person per month.

Winner: OneNote

Evernote vs OneNote: Which Improves Your Productivity Better

Clearly, it is not easy to choose one in Evernote Vs OneNote. They are very good and have benefits of their own that the other one does not provide.

If you’re primarily looking for a tool that lets you easily capture, organize and find content from the web, you’ll want Evernote, because its tools for doing that are exemplary. If you instead want to create notes from scratch and have them in well-organized notebooks, or if you’re a heavy Office 365 user, OneNote is the way to go.