The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I use both Evernote and Notability together for notetaking and record keeping. I use my two traditional note-taking products: Evernote and Notability.  I consider Evernote my main note repository since it is fully Cross-platform That means that Evernote has an app (in my case) for the iPhone, iPad, software for the PC, and a web-based format as well.  So, I can get to my notes from any of these devices, from someone else's phone, or from anywhere I happen to be.  My notes are stored in the cloud and are replicated across all of these platforms.  This is important to me.  I have over 3,000 notes and I refer to them regularly.  When I am deciding which app to use for a note, Evernote is my default choice if the content of the note will be text-based.  Any note where typing is the mode of input goes immediately into Evernote.  I onl...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share some tips for organizing your notes and making them easily searchable in Evernote. I use Evernote as my main note-taking app.  I've done a couple of videos about Evernote, but in this one, I want to talk specifically about organizing and finding notes.  First -- a quick overview on how Evernote structures itself organizationally.  The primary organizational unit for Evernote is the  Notebook Notebooks should contain broad topics.  You can add as many as you want, but I think you should limit the number you have or it will be unwieldy.  Obviously, if you are just starting out, you aren't going to have any notes yet, but my rule of thumb is that each notebook should contain at least 100 notes.  If you don't ever think you'll put that many notes in a notebook, it's probably not notebook worthy.  The 6 notebooks I have are: Books ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I take all of the passages that I've highlighted in a Kindle book and either stick them in Evernote or format them for Google Sheets. It probably won't surprise you, based on my penchant for paperless everything, that I prefer to read books on the Kindle.  I still miss some things about physical books, but for me, the benefits of reading on a Kindle far outweigh them.  In particular, I like the search function and the highlight function.  Since I do most of my reading in bed, I really like not having to wrestle with a highlighting pen and a heavy book while reclining.  You might have noticed, if you highlight like I do, that even when you are on the Kindle app for iPad, you can't just copy and paste passages of a book that you want to share. Probably for copyright reasons.   That said, what Amazon DOES have is a unique website for you that compil...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar and in today's video, I'll show you how I use Evernote to "attach" files to my iPhone calendar events.  I use Google Calendar to keep track of personal and family appointments.  And I access Google Calendar from a variety of places, but the majority of the time I'm looking at my calendar from my iPhone or iPad.  Up until this week, I've been using the built in iPhone Calendar app.  I decided to try out the Google Calendar app, which I like so far -- but this video really applies to either mobile app.  Just a quick technical note before I dive in - Between web-based Google Calendar and the indigenous iPhone calendar app, most of the fields translate perfectly. Like date, time and place. But some fields don't have counterparts. For example, the URL field in the iPhone Calendar app doesn't have a corresponding field in Google Calendar, so if you populate it on your phone, it doesn't show...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my slightly off the wall use of the AnyList app for remembering stuff when you are leaving the house for multiple activities.  If you'd watched some of my other videos, you might know that my ADHD brain has issues keeping more than 3 things in it at any one time -- otherwise known as working memory.  I'm a mom with active teenagers and this deficit is particularly annoying when we forget important things that they need for activities. I remember showing up to football practice once with Crocs and no cleats -- that didn't go over well with the coaches. And we have forgotten tennis racquets for clinics more times than I care to recall. I won't bore you with more examples, but believe me when I tell you there were MANY and I really needed a system to prevent it from continuing to happen.  The biggest problem was not when we have just one activity. My kids and I...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I use Notability and Google Sheets for paperless packing lists. I'm always amazed at people who don't use packing lists.  I would forget at a minimum 10% of the stuff I needed to bring, which would be inconvenient in the extreme.  Even if I don't use a packing list to aid while packing, for shorter trips for example, I always use one as a check afterwards to make sure I remembered everything.   I know that there are a billion apps out there specifically designed to create packing lists -- and I've tried out a bunch of them.  But for whatever reason, I really prefer having all of my packing items on a single "piece of paper" and marking them off one by one.  I don't like having things organized by someone else's categories or the effort required to change those categories.  I want to be able to sort my list in a way that makes packing...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share a couple of systems that I use to find things in my house!  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.   In almost every household, there is one "finder."  Something is lost?  Call in the Finder.  From my extremely informal polling, I've found that the Finder tends to be the woman of the house, but that is not true in mine!  My husband is definitely the Finder. He is frequently tasked with finding shoes, tennis racquets, mobile devices, stuff in the fridge and in one embarrassing incident, the keys that I was searching high and low for -- sneakily located in my right hand.   When I started staying at home with the kids over a decade ago, I found myself calling him multiple times a day to ask where things were.  I quickly found that to be an unsust...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'm going to share the second part of my policies and methods for semi-paperless filing.  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.   In the first video on paperless filing, I talked through my policies for recycling paper and which files I physically keep.  I also shared that Evernote is my main service for paperless filing and that there are three cool tools that I use in conjunction with Evernote.  The first was the built in photo attaching tool.  The second is . . . Scannable app - Okay -- if the document that I want to save electronically is longer, like say 5 pages long, I will usually save that as a PDF using Scannable.  I love this app that was created to work beautifully with Evernote.  You don't even need to snap the picture, just hover over the d...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'm going to share Part 1 of my policies and methods for semi-paperless filing.  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.   Okay -- when I say that I'm paperless, I'm not talking about being an over-the-top nut job about it.  I do not scan everything that comes into my house. That would be time consuming and crazy.  But -- if I think I may want to have access to that piece of information when I'm out and about -- I store it electronically.  So, really I have 3 options, pitch, physically file or electronically file.  Let's go through each.  Pitch I come from a family who, let's just say, keeps things, so the advent of the  Internet has really helped me get rid of things.  My basic policy is -- if I can access it online easily, I get rid of it. That p...

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...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'm going to share an overview of the organizational tech systems I use to compensate for my ADHD forgetfulness and distraction.  I come from a long line of folks afflicted (and blessed) with ADHD Inattentive type. Everyone in my family of origin has some degree of ADHD and I've passed it down to both of my kids. They are, as you can imagine, eternally grateful. I've never been diagnosed and I don't take medicine for it, but I definitely have many of the symptoms: distractibility, organization problems, forgetfulness, and tragically bad working memory (or the ability to keep more than 2 things in your head at one time). Even though I didn't have a label for what I was dealing with early on, I knew I needed to compensate for my clear deficits in these areas, just to get stuff done and not be constantly apologizing for not responding, missing appointments, and forgetting things.  The wa...