My ADHD Brain: Paperless Notetaking with Evernote, Google Sheets and Notability


Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll share the apps and systems that I use for paperless note-taking.  This is part of a series on my ADHD brain and all of the systems I use to compensate for a lack of internal structure and organization.  
I'm not sure what initially drove me to be semi-paperless in my personal life. It was probably a combination of being overwhelmed by all of the paper streaming into my home, wanting to have access to my files where ever I was, and the giant technological advances that made it not just doable, but also pretty appealing. Whatever it was, once I got my iPad, I stopped relying on paper.

Evernote

My primary note taking app is Evernote. It is cross platform, which is a recurring theme and a priority to me. It means that I can access it from my iPhone, iPad, any web browser, or Windows software on my computer. It started out with rudimentary functionality, particularly the mobile apps, but is now has become fairly robust. It doesn't do everything I want, but pretty darn close. Let's go through some highlights.
  • Organization - Evernote uses notebooks as an organizing device. I have one may notebook which I call Lara's Brain. Then I have some more minor note books: Recipes, Kids Projects, Writing, Books — which reflect some of my interests and projects. But Lara's Brain is the dumping ground for almost all notetaking. What goes in here? Really anything I may need to remember later: usernames, the bell schedules for my kids schools, printer cartridge types, clothing sizes for my family, ideas for gifts, warranty info, notes on ANYTHING, vaccination records for my dog, planning for a party, project planning, brainstorming, etc. I really write down the most patently obvious things, but I know myself well enough to know that I will not remember them without an aid. To me, this is like cleaning out the RAM of my brain and sending it to long term storage to free up working space. The only catch is that I have to make sure I can retrieve it later.  Which brings me to . . .
  • Tags - Evernote uses tags to help you retrieve notes. A note can only be in one notebook, but it can have multiple tags. For example, I have a recipe for Opening Night Pasta in my Recipe Notebook. I have it tagged both as a Main Dish and as an Entertainment Meal. So, if I look for either tag, it will come up. I also use pretty detailed titles that cover all the ways I may want to search for the note later. For example I have a note called "Filing Taxes for Minors Kids Children IRS".  Which is basically a title full of search terms.
  • Tags are Not-Specific - Tags are not specific to notebook, which is not great for me since my notebooks don't have much overlap with each other. I get around this by grouping my tags.  In the Windows version of Evernote, you can create sub tags for this purpose, but they don't translate well to the mobile apps. What I do is, for example, for my recipe notebook, all of the recipe specific tags have a small "r" in front of them. Like rMain Dish, rApps, and rDessert. 
  • Other Media - Evernote allows you to add other media to any note. You can add a photo, image, website, audio file, attachment, or a basic drawing. The drawing and handwriting functionality is not as good as some, but Evernote is also integrated with the Skitch app, so you can add text and arrows and draw on photos if you don't mind Skitch's very specific aesthetic. 
  • Scannable or Pocket - I use both of these apps to facilitate getting stuff into Evernote. The Scannable app turns your phone into a scanner and Pocket strips formatting from websites to make them more readable in Evernote. More about these in my video about paperless filing. 

Google Sheets

Evernote is great as a note taking app, but I tend to think and plan in spreadsheet form. I used to use Excel, but in the interest of having all of my files available on every device, I switched to Google Sheets and love it.  I'm practically a Google Sheets evangelist. Google Sheets is part of the Google Drive app and is one of the suite of products available if you have a Google login. I already use Gmail and Google Calendar, so this was easy for me.  In addition, their collaborative editing capability is fantastic — multiple people can work on the same document at the same time without messing up the versioning.  I use Google sheets to plan big projects, organize groups, make a list of purchases for renovations, divide expenses, do budget reporting, and hundreds of other things. My tags on Google Sheets are very similar to those that I use for Evernote to keep things uniform. I also use Google Drive to store PDFs, and to create presentations, forms and some word processing documents (the print formatting on Google Docs is better than Evernote). 

Notability app

Digital notetaking can be very linear. One text word goes in front of another. My brain doesn't always work that way. My paper notes were always littered with sketches, circles, arrows, and stuff written on the sides. I like to visually map certain things out and sometimes feel constrained by the text-centric focus of Evernote. In times like this, I use Notability's iPad app. I use a stylus to diagram, scribble, and draw to my heart's content. I can pull photos or images in and draw on top of them, pull in PDF forms and fill them out, scratch out my task list, and map my ideas. With only a couple of exceptions, like packing lists and forms, I don't tend to store things in Notability. I mark them up and then export them as PDFs to Google Drive or as an image to an Evernote note.
This was a quick spin around my suite of Notetaking apps. I've experimented with a bunch of them and these are the ones that fit my needs the best. I'd love to hear your tips!  Thanks so much for watching and I really appreciate any comments you leave below. 

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