Evernote is my favorite app. It’s a combination of a to-do list and a scrapbooking app, targeted specifically at weirdo Virgos like me who are overflowing with unfocused creative ideas but also like everything nice and tidy and in a list. You can use words, pictures, video or audio, or an awesome pastiche of all of the above, as I often do.
Any time the slightest thought comes into my mind, I make a note in Evernote—which is especially easy because the data lives in the cloud, so I can access it at any time from my Mac, my iPad or my iPhone and it auto-syncs across every platform. (Can you tell I’ve been writing B2B marketing copy all week?)
At this point, I’m up to 81 notes. I just counted. A lot of them are perfectly reasonable things like “grocery list” or “lyrics to the Arlo Guthrie song ‘City of New Orleans’,” which I’ve been meaning to memorize for about 36 years. Some of them are less practical but bound to come in handy at some point. Here are 10 that I just pulled out:
- Names for teams if I ever have to name a team
- Imaginary band names
- Possible screen names if I’m ever held at gunpoint and forced to Internet date
- Creative ways to turn down being asked out
- Non-morning people, for solidarity
- Things people said in the 70s that I’d like to bring back
- Restaurants in SF I can go to in a pinch if I’m having a hypoglycemic meltdown and can’t think
- Things I could do alone in France
- Romantic things to do with platonic girlfriends in lieu of having a boyfriend
- Wildly achievable bucket list
I’m not sure if Evernote is helping or enabling my creative OCD.
