Evernote is a cloud-service that helps you collect and categorize information. It stores it and synchronises it with your computer. Actually, I do not exactly now how and where it keeps my information. I do not care: it is safe, somewhere, and there are ways to do a local backup. I do not use it for confidential stuff, anyway. I do not care about more. Now, how does it help me?

When I first heard about Evernote, I did not even understand what a stupid note-taking service should be good for. That lack of understanding did help me to waste a lot of my time.
Before I was doing notes in Wikis or worse in the Wiki in Redmine. Capturing information was … hard work. Searching was sometimes successful, make it look good was pretty impossible.
Evernote is not a silver-bullet solution to every problem. But it does a lot for me in terms of avoiding lose & lost ends.
Do not lose information, once found
Evernote helps me to keep things available. It consists of “notes” stored within “notebooks”. You can assign keywords to the notes helping to categorise them. There is a working fulltext-search.
What makes it more valuable than a Wiki is:
- the Evernote client, allowing drag&drop with files … found a nice PDF document on the Internet? You may just copy the link onto a note and write a few keywords and a little explanation. Or just drag and drop the PDF, that’s it!
- Skitch, an App allowing to “scan” documents with your smartphone. Take a photo of it, click and it ends in Evernote … even having the perspective adjusted … cool? Yes! Helpful? Immensely!
- the Web-Clipper is an addon for browsers allowing to clip and copy and part of a Website. Found a nice info or explanation or whatever? Web-Clipper … stored.
Access your information
Access your notes from anywhere: there are apps for iOS and Android, allowing swift access to your notes.
Btw. the latest notes are usually top of the list, which is what you want. Snap those stupid meeting minutes, take a screenshot into a meeting or anything. This is the way you can do this without even understanding that in former times this has been complicated.
Client is optional
The web-client of Evernote is pretty good. If you work on somebody else’s computer, just use the browser and rest assured, you won’t miss anything substantial. Well, at least, I don’t.
Professional Service
There is a free plan for Evernote, so you can play with it without risk. Using it on a constant basis, I chose to use the smallest paid plan, because otherwise my monthly upload might exceed the allowance of the free plan. Look it up, make your own mind, free might be good enough for you.
Third party toys
There are quite a bunch of tools that interface Evernote. I do not need them, so why bother. But it might be worth to you to know that solution allow to digitise manually taken notes on the fly, etc. pp.. Some of this are really cool and … effortless.
Things that annoy me
What on earth is so difficult in writing a working text editor? Evernote on all platforms has problems with the text-properties when you work with them, esp. with Copy & Paste, but it is not limited to this: menu shows 14pt in your cursor position. Start typing and it shows the 18pt you had left of the cursor. Just one of the bugs this stupid editor has. That especially on a note-taking service the editor is that buggy is somewhat ironic.
After a while, you know the bugs and can live with them … somehow.
Things I am missing
Linking notes into other notes is … too complicated (copy a notes link from a context menu and insert it into your current note. What is so difficult to have such thing as drag & drop?