Cloud-Based Organization with Evernote and Dropbox

Knowledge is power, and as a marketer I am often asked to demonstrate or share that knowledge. Working at Laughlin Constable, I’ve found it very important to have that knowledge instantly available to me, at any time of day, from anywhere in the world, and from any device.

I know I can not remember everything, and I also know that maximizing my productivity is essential. To stay organized I’ve found I heavily rely on these two excellent cloud-based services.

Dropbox

While there are many cloud-based storage options, I’m still loyal to Dropbox. The free service essentially gives you the ability to share and sync files across your computer, the Dropbox website, and even your mobile devices.

I use the service exclusively for transferring files between my home and office, not to mention sharing files with my team(s). Dropbox offers up to 2GB of free storage to every user, and you also have the option to purchase additional space at a very low cost.

Because the service lives in the cloud, any file you save to Dropbox will be immediately available to any other device.

Yes, you could consider many of the other cloud-based storage options out there but I’ve found that Dropbox just works. No more USB drives, external hard drives, CD / DVDs, or other tools to transfer my most recent or important work.

And as an Adjunct Professor at Marquette University, it’s a great tool to save all of my lesson plans and presentations. This way I never forget anything or accidentally leave something at home, it’s always available to me.

Dropbox is available for the Mac, PC, Linux and mobile devices.

Evernote

Organization was one of my leading reasons to use Evernote, but I quickly began to use the cloud-based service to archive articles from the web, PDFs of important documents, and even my meeting notes.

The service allows you to simply add notes, but there is a benefit in organizing them into specific notebooks and tagging each entry. This make it much more easy to perform a search against your notes and other items you have synced with the service.

If someone asks me for the most recent stats on mobile device usage I can quickly perform a search and filter my notes based off the tags or other criteria. While that covers the most basic functionality of the service, there are also many other benefits to using Evernote:

• Notebooks can be shared which makes collaboration across an organization extremely easy.
• Text recognition is built into the service, so once your notes are synced to the cloud, you can search for content in images and other file types.
• Evernote provides you with a unique e-mail address so you can send notes directly to the service from your e-mail account or while on the go.
• The Webclipper makes it easy to collect almost anything you see on the Web.
• Because everything lives in the cloud, you also have note history and revisions available to you.
• Although the service lives in the cloud, notebooks are completely available when offline on any of your devices.

Evernote is available for practically every platform and device. I use the premium version of the service, which is priced at $45.00 / year. Still undecided if Evernote is for you? Check out the video below.