Last May, I wrote about the beginning of the journey with Evernote. In the 10 months since I’ve learned a lot about Evernote. At the time, I was migrating from OneNote and OneNote Online because they simply weren’t doing what I needed them to do. I had great hopes for Evernote, but I wasn’t really sure of exactly how to use it. I knew that it could act as an electronic filing cabinet, so I started putting things in notebooks and organizing away. I also read a number of great books to help me get a better handle on what Evernote could do for me.

As with all tools that I start using, I tried to do too many things in Evernote that might have been more reasonable to do elsewhere. Apparently I have to learn this lesson with every new tool. I don’t know why it doesn’t stick, but this lesson keeps getting taught…and I keep failing to learn.

To that end, I’ve spent the better part of January reorganizing my electronic filing that’s in Evernote. I’ve changed the setup of my stacks, I’ve renamed notebooks, consolidated notebooks, and worked really hard to get all the notes into notebooks and tagged appropriately. Although I’ve spent a ton of time on the actual work, I’ve also been thinking about how I’m using Evernote and honing that usage to best suit my needs.

While reorganizing my Evernote configuration, I realized that capturing paper has been an issue.  I’m currently “officed” on a desk in our kitchen, despite the fact that I have a perfectly suitable home office. The problem with my home office is twofold (1) I’m providing childcare for my grandson, and the office isn’t currently organized in such a manner that it’s a good place for us and (2) the office started to get into even greater than normal disarray when I spent July and August traveling to and from New Jersey. Quite frankly, the place is a disaster and needs a complete overhaul. Tentatively that’s scheduled for March of this year.

The important part about not being in the office is that the Epson Artisan 837 All-in-One scanner/printer that I use is located in the office…half a house away. That means that if I want to scan or copy something, I have to take it into the office. I’ve gotten into this horrible habit of creating a stack of things that need to be copied or scanned. Then I’ll take all those items into the office and batch duplicate them. Of course, then I have to distribute them from my Windows PC to where they ought to be saved permanently. As you can imagine, this tasks rarely gets done, and even more rarely gets done to full completion. Right now I’ve got several hundred scanned items in my Windows PC directory that need to be distributed. It’s going to take the better part of two days to get them all named, labeled, and located in the right places. And this is a sufficiently low priority item that I’m probably not going to do it for a while. Which means the backlog will be that much greater.

As you can see, I’ve identified the problem. Now for the solution.

While reading the Evernote blog, I ran across a post on Evernote Scannable. Basically, it’s an iOS app that allows you to use your phone as a scanner. Then you can post the scanned documents into Evernote. Watch the video to get an idea of what you can do and how easy it is to use. I’m still struggling with using it a bit…I keep wanting to use the automated mode rather than the manual mode…but overall it’s been a huge game changer for me.

For example, one of the projects that we’re working on for Hectic-Kitchen.com is a listing of recipes from the back of the boxes of foods you already have in your pantry. It’s kind of a simple idea, but it’s a great way to turn something like Mac ‘n’ Cheese into a more interesting meal. When you’re on a budget and you’re buying the least expensive foods, monotony is a pretty big problem. Our back-of-the-box recipes remind people that you don’t need to be hugely creative to change your meals around a bit. The big problem with those recipes is actually capturing them. While we call them “back-of-the-box” recipes, a large number of them actually come from the back of bags, cans, and other food packaging. The first issue is that these items have food on them. The second issue is that we don’t have a scanner in the kitchen or pantry. The reality is that we created a place to store these recipes for later scanning. Some of them got damaged. Some of them attracted bugs. And some of them got food all over the scanner. Not to mention that having a pile of parts of food boxes and bags is pretty unsightly.

We’ve been looking for a better solution, and Evernote Scannable appears to be it. Since I have my phone with me almost all the time, including when I’m in the kitchen, I’m able to capture back of the box recipes with ease. How does it work in reality…really well. I’ll see a recipe on a can, box, or package. I pull out my phone and open Evernote Scannable. Then I take a photo of the recipe and share it with Evernote. In fact, you can select the notebook where you share the photo. Since I’m primarily using this to scan recipes right now, I’ve been saving them to my recipes notebook. One of the useful features for me is that these photos aren’t saved to the Camera Roll or Photo Stream. When I tried to create this same kind of functionality before, I would have to remember to delete the photos from the Camera Roll after sharing them. Frankly I would forget and then run out of space on my phone. I know it’s a stupid little thing, but it was one of those little irritations that made the solution less likely to be used. With Evernote Scannable I’ve avoided that problem.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m still learning to use the app, and it’s far from perfect. Nevertheless, it’s providing a solution to a problem that I’ve been having for a while. Of course, it’s also free…so that helps a ton! You can get Evernote Scannable on the iTunes store.