Good places to learn.

[Husky Logic 11]

I'm a big fan of Steve Dotto and would do anything to take his course Paperless Office Made Easy. However money is tight with no one working these days and I just don't have the 250.00 to take it.  is there anything on Youtube or online you all can suggest for someone who wants to learn? 

[gazumped 11,661]

Hi. Videos and How To's are all very well, but I find that presenters can usually only cover generalities.  The best way to get familiar with Evernote (IMHO) is just to use it - for anything from documenting your beer-label collection to drafting your next book.  When you hit a problem of some sort,  do some web searches,  post it here and find a solution.  It takes a while,  but you get familiar with what is,  and what is not possible. 

[PinkElephant 8,094]

IMHO it is not about going paperless - it’s about getting productive.

The GTD Gettings things Done book from David Allen is always a good starting point.

The GTD website offers an easy to implement guide for GTD with EN using the windows client. The download will cost 10$, and covers the way to implement the method with EN. It will work with the Mac client as well, and probably with the WebClient.

[DTLow 5,736]

9 hours ago, Husky Logic said:

course Paperless Office Made Easy

Just wondering about any specifics for what you want to learn    
imho A most important question is how to store/organize digital records   
You're posting in the Evernote forum so you've got a good start in solving that

[Husky Logic 11]

5 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

IMHO it is not about going paperless - it’s about getting productive.

The GTD Gettings things Done book from David Allen is always a good starting point.

The GTD website offers an easy to implement guide for GTD with EN using the windows client. The download will cost 10$, and covers the way to implement the method with EN. It will work with the Mac client as well, and probably with the WebClient.

Thanks for that advise, but I've read GTD and I don't see anything in there that will help me what learning how to take my office paperless. 

[Husky Logic 11]

33 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Just wondering about any specifics for what you want to learn    
imho A most important question is how to store/organize digital records   
You're posting in the Evernote forum so you've got a good start in solving that

I guess my questions are more about what a good system is to put in place, and what I really need to keep? Do I really need to scan and save all my utility bills? I don't plan on deducting purchases on my taxes so do I really need to scan every receipt I have. I was going through our storage room a couple days ago and found a box of papers. It had bank statements from 2008 that were never even opened.  I mean come on, who really needs that? I 

[gazumped 11,661]

2 hours ago, Husky Logic said:

Do I really need to scan and save all my utility bills?

In a different thread I already said "I scan everything unless there's a good reason NOT to scan it" - the only good reasons,  IMHO,  being mainly 1) incriminating evidence 2) flyers from local shops.  I don't delete much either - just elapsed reminders.

I have a couple of boxes of stuff that are years old that I didn't get around to scanning yet,  but my view: once you bought into the Evernote eco-system,  you may as well scan everything that you can - the only cost is disk space (pretty cheap these days) and (AFAIK) I've never even come close to the current upload limit. There are arguments about performance,  but you can get around any limitations by using notebooks, titles and tags intelligently.  And you never know what information might be useful.

I went to buy a new headlamp bulb from a dealer a while ago - where I previously bought the bulb that failed on me. They seem to have invented a whole new classification system for bulbs since I last had to do that,  so I couldn't find a match in the hundreds of current options for the brief description I wrote down at the time.  The guy at the counter apologised that they'd upgraded their computer system a couple of years ago,  so he couldn't find any matches either.  I checked the dealer's name in Evernote and came up with the receipt for the original purchase which included a part number that was still current.  The dealer was impressed...

Anyway scanning takes a few seconds - and for the older stuff I'll do a month's worth of receipts in one PDF. I OCR locally so I'm guaranteed it will be searchable (large and 100+ page PDFs may not be processed by Evernote) and in the event that I need something I can extract a separate page.

But - your choice; don't make it a chore. Scanning documentation is part of my routine and I'm happy to do it.

[DTLow 5,736]

53 minutes ago, gazumped said:

I scan everything unless there's a good reason NOT to scan it" - the only good reasons,  IMHO,  being mainly 1) incriminating evidence ...

I encrypt the ...sensitive... material

[DTLow 5,736]

3 hours ago, Husky Logic said:

I guess my questions are more about what a good system is to put in place, and what I really need to keep?

As per @gazumped, I file everything

The challenge is to implement an organization system so data can be retrieved when required   
Warning - Evernote does not support a folder filing methodology   
                  We get metadata; notebook/tag/date/... fields and note titles    
                  Tags are the primary organizing tool

[CalS 5,280]

6 hours ago, Husky Logic said:

I guess my questions are more about what a good system is to put in place, and what I really need to keep? Do I really need to scan and save all my utility bills? I don't plan on deducting purchases on my taxes so do I really need to scan every receipt I have. I was going through our storage room a couple days ago and found a box of papers. It had bank statements from 2008 that were never even opened.  I mean come on, who really needs that? I 

Read your own post.    Jut shred those historical bank statements.  If you don't want a historical view of usage shred those utility bills.  If you don't have any returns to speak of or don't care when did I buy that thingamajig, shred those receipts. 

On a go forward basis maybe you want to download and save the PDFs for your bank/credit statements.  Pick a point in time, now I suppose, and say from this point forward I want to digitize all this type of stuff.  Look backward and say I want to digitize this and shred the rest.  The only thing you can't undo is the shredding of history.  Great thing about EN is that you can adjust your tagging/notebooking in pretty quick order without a whole lot of pain, typically.  So per @gazumped, jump in the pool.

[Blair26 0]

On 4/14/2020 at 10:08 AM, Husky Logic said:

I'm a big fan of Steve Dotto and would do anything to take his course Paperless Office Made Easy. However money is tight with no one working these days and I just don't have the 250.00 to take it.  is there anything on Youtube or online you all can suggest for someone who wants to learn? 

Going thorugh some old posts and articles are enough. That would help you to get clear ideas UPSers

[FreeBeer 0]

Taking the plunge this year and doing a major purge of old ***** and digitizing as much as possible. Tieing it to tax time and so far its going well. I debated over getting a scanner, but in the end, decided to use the free app from Microsoft called 'Lens'. It simply takes a picture (PDF) of the page and supports adding multiple pages for those longer and double-sided docs. Just doing an INBOX method where I review later and rename as/if needed. Then a simple folder per year with subfolders when/if needed for special scans or important items. Most just goto a general folder under the year because they are recurring, common items.

Only catch is that MS Lens doesn't upload to Evernote. But, I'm at the point where I've decided no one offering from one source (i.e. Evernote, Onenote/Onedrive, Notion, etc.) is going to do everything. So, I use Evernote for some things and Onenote/Onedrive for others. In this case, the Finances are going over to Microsoft. I opted for the family plan for Onedrive at $99 per year. It gives me 5 users and 1TB of space for each. 

On the organization side, I stumbled across something called PARA that you can Google. Its a way of organizing your data into Projects — Areas — Resources — Archives. Not a lot different that what I was doing but like most people, always looking to improve.

I could import or export from one into the other to keep everything in one, which I have done previously. But, its too much work to do for everything all the time. So, I now have multiple  services for varying purposes, as described by:

1.) Evernote

• Tech info and research. 
• System settings 

2.) Onenote / Onedrive

• Home organization - Onenote
• Scanned docs - Onedrive
• General doc/pics storage and backups 1TB X 5 users!

3.) Clickup

• Tasks and projects
• Nice Google Calendar integration.

4.) Notion

• New kid on the block. Wow so far but steep learning curve (at least for me). It almost does too much and they're just getting started.
• Testing Calendars, tasks, and such for now.
• No offline storage yet beyond last read cache!

 

Good luck in your journey.

W.

 

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, FreeBeer said:

I debated over getting a scanner, but in the end, decided to use the free app from Microsoft called 'Lens'. It simply takes a picture (PDF) of the page...

For Apple users, there's Evernote's Scannable app.  Works great with an iPhone or iPad   
I haven't used a scanner for years

>>I now have multiple  services for varying purposes

I use various editors but there's a benefit in using a single service for storage/organization 
Evernote is my digital filing cabinet

[CalS 5,280]

1 hour ago, FreeBeer said:

Only catch is that MS Lens doesn't upload to Evernote.

If you are referring to MS Office Lens you can save to EN.  Scroll down the screen and press More Apps.  Then press Evernote.  A bit more work than one press but it gets the job done.  And per @DTLow Scannable is a viable alternative.

       

 

[gazumped 11,661]

Another (occasional) Lens user here too - I like the fact that it corrects skewed perspective,  especially for things like book covers.  Counter for that is I'm generally too lazy to bother with Evernote's (Android) camera app being a tap or two away.

[PinkElephant 8,094]

ScannerPro on my iPhone. Perspective correction included, OCR included, Upload to Cloud services included. And for me the killer feature is the ability to create and save workflows for the import into EN (or other services).

You scan, create a pdf (or jpg) from the scan, it is OCRed, tap on share, select the appropriate workflow, and it is automatically uploaded to EN, into the specified notebook and with a set of standard tags. I have roughly 2 handful of workflows, with setups like receipts/tax, personal, document, recipe and a general one for the Inbox. It saves a lot of time for the post-Processing of documents.