Overloaded with work, can Evernote help?

[KWalker 0]

I need a new productivity system for my work. I'm overloaded and its getting messy. I've heard about Evernote and thought it might be the thing I need, but I thought I'd check in with current users before I get started.

 

Here's my situation: I'm a real estate photographer with one of the biggest agencies in the area. I shooting about 5 listings a day covering about a 50 mile radius. The agents use an internal system to send a photo request that goes to a Gmail account I share with the other photographer with all the data about the shoot (address, agent, sellers name & contact, who to shedule it with, notes, etc). Currently I use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of everything for my shoots and billing. I color code each shoot so I can see what the status is (called & left message, scheduled, on hold, uploaded and billed). I like this system, but since I'm on the road all day, it's difficult to keep up with the barrage of photo request email, scheduling calls and tracking projects. We're just at the beginning of the super busy season and I'll be up to 8-10 listings a day within the next month and I can't afford to let things fall through the cracks.

 

So here's what I'd like to do with EN:

• Have a "master list" of all my shoots with the data from the Gmail. I think I'd like it to be one big list as opposed to each project on its own, but I'm not sure. I did 226 listing in the 1st quarter this year. That seems like a lot to have as singles.
• Be able to tag or mark each listing with things like "scheduled", "left message", "uploaded", etc. Probably at least 5 tags
• Schedule my shoots on my calendar and sync with iCal
• Be able to do this while I've got 5 minutes in between shoots while I'm in my car using my iPhone.

What do you think? Can EV save my sanity?

 

[gazumped 9,555]

OK:  the worst time to introduce a new system is when you're frantically busy.  No matter how great the system grows,  it will inevitably have a learning curve,  and bugs that need ironing out before it works properly,  so you're going to work harder for a while before it beds in.  Proceed at your own risk!

 

In theory,  and in certain limits,  Evernote can help you.  First,  you can redirect your incoming mail to Evernote.  IFTTT has some nice scripts that take an incoming mail and create a new note with appropriate tags.  So you can have an 'Inbox' notebook and a 'New' tag (or whatever's appropriate) to start off your process.

 

You could go through your inbox and go through the initial steps - call to set up shoot,  etc;  and move that note to another notebook.  Scheduled,  if you set a date for the job;  Pending if you're waiting for something.  If you set a date for the job,  my recommendation would be to set the Created Date of that note to the date and time of your visit.  You can then sort the notebook in descending Created Date order and see the current and upcoming jobs listed.  Put things like zip codes and times in the title of the note too,  and you can use the list as a daily schedule,  or update iCal (manually,  there's no syncing here..).

 

(Evernote does have Reminders which would do the same thing,  but that's another learning curve you can maybe look at later!)

 

If you're putting photos into Evernote,  be careful of the size - there's a 60MB note limit for the 'free' client,  and a massive 4GB for premium.  You'd need the latter!

 

Beware that your phone has to sync details you enter to the main server,  so you need a good network connection or solid wifi.  You need to sync as often as you can.

 

You can use as many tags as you like on each note,  and include as much or as little as you need in the title. 

 

As I said up front - you're effectively building a new system out of Evernote's "lego box" of features,  so fine tuning may be required.  Best of luck - if you have more questions,  please post back here - there will always be someone around with suggestions.

 

PS

#1 When you're using external apps like iCal,  you can usually include a link to the relevant Evernote note,  so you can quickly look up the full details and add/ edit comments.

#2 Evernote note content is only available if you have a network connection or if you've downloaded a particular notebook (or notebooks) to your phone.  You might only need the 'Scheduled' notes for the current day,  so might need to keep those in an 'offline searchable' notebook.  What you can keep on your phone is limited by the storage capacity available.

#3 You're carrying around lots of mission-critical stuff on your phone,  so sync often and make daily (at least) backups of your desktop data.

[CalS 5,013]

Two more cents, same caveats as Gaz re incorporating change at a busy time.

1. Use something like IFTTT or using the same logic create a forwarding rule in Gmail to send the photo requests to your INBOX in EN.
2. Update the title with shoot specifics, add the appropriate tags, and move from the INBOX to your "master list" notebook.  
3. I would precede all of the scheduling tags with the same character, ! perhaps, to facilitate searches and tagging.
4. Adjust the tags on the notes as the shoot moves through its cycle.
5. Get Sunrise calendar on your iPhone and desktop,  Link Sunrise to your Gmail calendar and enable Evernote reminders.  
6. Create a reminder on the shoot note when you establish the scheduled date/time.
7. When you add the reminder in EN it will automatically appear in Sunrise.  This will integrate your Gmail calendar and the shoot schedule (EN reminders) in one place.  Sunrise is free, simple to install and use, and should be worth the minimal effort for what you are attempting.
8. Keep the pictures out of EN if you can so as to not have long sync times when in the field using EN and Sunrise and Gmail.

Good luck!  Jury's out relative to EN saving your sanity!  

[Frank.dg 1,385]

I need a new productivity system for my work. I'm overloaded and its getting messy. I've heard about Evernote and thought it might be the thing I need, but I thought I'd check in with current users before I get started.

 

Evernote is not a productivity system as such... but it works well with any existing smart productivity systems. I would highly advise reading a couple of good books on organizing your workflow/ material. GTD is broad enough to find at least a handful of good, common-sense strategies for doing so. One doesn't just adopt a system... one has to grow with it... but still, you'll need to know what's involved. You have to take the book by the horns and do some reading. If you can't invest the time to read a good productivity book, you're always going to be kind of halfway there. Once one delves into productivity literature, the ways in which you can use Evernote to that end becomes all at once apparent. 

 

Some people have a knack for this kind of thing, in which case, Evernote might be intuitive... but for people such as myself, a productivity system was a prerequisite to using Evernote in a half decent way. 

 

 

... you're effectively building a new system out of Evernote's "lego box" of features...

 

I love this analogy. 

 

[JMichaelTX 4,104]

I need a new productivity system for my work. I'm overloaded and its getting messy. I've heard about Evernote and thought it might be the thing I need, but I thought I'd check in with current users before I get started.

 

Here's my situation: I'm a real estate photographer with one of the biggest agencies in the area. I shooting about 5 listings a day covering about a 50 mile radius. The agents use an internal system to send a photo request that goes to a Gmail account I share with the other photographer with all the data about the shoot (address, agent, sellers name & contact, who to shedule it with, notes, etc). Currently I use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of everything for my shoots and billing. I color code each shoot so I can see what the status is (called & left message, scheduled, on hold, uploaded and billed). I like this system, but since I'm on the road all day, it's difficult to keep up with the barrage of photo request email, scheduling calls and tracking projects. We're just at the beginning of the super busy season and I'll be up to 8-10 listings a day within the next month and I can't afford to let things fall through the cracks.

 

So here's what I'd like to do with EN:

• Have a "master list" of all my shoots with the data from the Gmail. I think I'd like it to be one big list as opposed to each project on its own, but I'm not sure. I did 226 listing in the 1st quarter this year. That seems like a lot to have as singles.
• Be able to tag or mark each listing with things like "scheduled", "left message", "uploaded", etc. Probably at least 5 tags
• Schedule my shoots on my calendar and sync with iCal
• Be able to do this while I've got 5 minutes in between shoots while I'm in my car using my iPhone.

What do you think? Can EV save my sanity?

 

While Evernote is a great note-taking, web-clipping, PIM, it is a general purpose system and can take a lot of work to devise a process within Evernote that works well.  The more people that are involved with this, the more complicated it wlll be to make it work effectively.

 

I don't have any specifics to offer, but I'm reasonably sure that your requirements are not unique, and are faced by the multitude of real estate photographers across the country, even the world.  So I would guess that there are some dedicated apps for supporting your process.  Don't be lured by the very cheap price of Evernote.  It could cost you far more in time and mistakes to to design/setup/train for a Evernote system that barely meets your needs vs paying a reasonable amount for a dedicated app.

 

Therefore, I would recommend that you spend some time researching/googling to find out what apps are available.  If you belong to any professional associations, they might also be a good resource.

 

Evernote does NOT provide for any built-in fields, or custom fields, that I would expect a dedicated app to provide, like all of the details for requests and shoots.  So searching, and particularly sorting, will be more of a challenge with Evernote.

[DutchPete 246]

You could also see if there are real estate photographers communities on social media such as Google+, Facebook, ......

They could well have suggestions that are appropriate for your line of activity, and those suggestions might include using Evernote and/or maybe some other apps that could get you up and running in a relatively short period of time, instead of having to reinvent the wheel for yourself tinkering & fine-tuning Evernote.