Saving Quotes With Evernote [Workflows]

A few friends have asked me recently how I use Evernote to organize quotes I come across for future writing, speaking or whatever.

One of the great things about Evernote as a platform is its ability to make “capture” really easy. It’s the perfect tool for archiving and accessing those savory quotes you come across as you go about your daily life. But how do you get them in there to start with?

Well, it’s worth considering how you tend to “find” quotes you like in the first place. I’ve found my great quote clips come from a number of sources.

Consider the Sources
 1) Twitter - Yeah, there’s a lot of drivel out there, but Twitter has ended up being a great place to “follow” some notable quotables. (Some of my favorites include: @chspurgeon@CSLewisDaily, or @NeverTheTwains.

2) Personal Reading - by far my biggest source of “capture” - when I’m reading I have a way of noting to myself that there’s a quote I want to go back and write down sometime.

3) The Web - This could include anything from blogs to news articles to white papers, etc.

4) Conversations With People - Sometimes things you hear people around you say, whether in conversation, creative meetings, or during sermons, etc. are worth saving for later!

The Process
There are several parts to making notable quotables useful to yourself in Evernote. Most of this is a riff on the principles behind David Allen’s, Getting Things Done. You find it’s one thing to save a bunch of quotes, but if you can’t quickly access them later when you need them, what good is it? That’s why all three steps are important:

1) Capture - get those quotes into a trusted system so that it all ends up in one place.

2) Process - name, tag and store those quotes in a way that ensures you’ll find them when you need them.

3) Search - quickly and reliably find your way back to those quotes for just the right moment.

Today I’ll just talk about what “Capture” looks like for me, using Evernote.

1) Copy and Paste
By far the simplest and smoothest way to get quotes into Evernote is by using good old Command+C and Control-Command-V to cut and paste. I use this for web quotes and even from PDF documents (using Preview for Mac) and Word documents. It’s a simple as cut-and-paste, but when you add in the “Control-Command-V” it opens Evernote and  pastes to a new note in the background. (This has become muscle memory for me.)

Evernote_clipping_preferences_
You can change your clipping Preferences in the drop down menu-bar icon, or in the application itself. That screen looks like this:
Evernote_clipping_preferences
2) Email it in . . .
I know that seems painfully obvious, but the magic is learning where to apply it. First off, every Evernote user has a personally assigned email address that allows them to mail in whatever they want into their account. Look for that address under Evernote>>Account Info
Account_info_2
So here’s what’s great about that. If you’re using an iOS device (or anything similar) and you come across a great quote in Twitter, just click on the button that lets you email the Tweet and select your Evernote address (hopefully you’ve saved it in your Contacts list, right?) and away it goes!
So this Twitter quote . . .
Photo_2
After you choose this option . . .
Photo_1
Looks like this . . .
Photo_3_2
And ends up as an Evernote note that looks like this . . .

 

Cslewisdaily_1-29-11_17-33
I usually go in and clean up some of that extra Twitter-fluff that comes along with the mail-in process. (Not that I don't like that pic of Lewis and all, but really).

By the way, this email-in flow works great with saving/archiving whole articles or blogposts when using Safari “Reader” view and emailing in the note from Mail.app. I also love the RSS app for iPhone called “Reeder” which lets you email in a whole blog post AND pre-select an automatic email address. So whole articles can go straight to Evernote in just a few screen taps.

3) While Reading A Book . . .
I tend to make marginal notes as I read books (paper ones) which serve as symbols or clues to myself later that there’s a particular quote I want to go back and capture. Lately the “code” for “this is a great quote!” is a box drawn in the margins with quotes around it. 

Something like this: “[]”

The box looks like a task - so I can check it off later to tell myself that I’ve entered it in. The quotes mean it’s a good quote!

Rather than put the book down and go to Evernote every time I come across a good quote, I leave these marks and go back through when I’ve finished the book. It takes a little time, but the entry process helps me remember the highlights of the book and forces me to be choosy about what gets saved for later!

The easiest and best way to do this is just by creating a new text note either in the desktop Evernote client or your mobile app. I have experimented with taking a photo snapshot of the quote or page and emailing it in to Evernote (something you can do from the mobile app). Truthfully, the images end up being searchable, meaning you can actually find any word in that photo later once it’s in Evernote. But it’s hard work getting a good photo to come through on the page, and I often end up wishing I’d just written it down.

4) On an eReader like Kindle
One of my new favorite tricks is getting quotes in while reading on Kindle - which has multiple formats besides the Kindle device itself. While your’e reading Kindle you can highlight and make notes, all of which get saved on your Kindle site at Amazon. From there it’s as easy as going in and doing the copy and paste trick I mentioned earlier.

However, since Amazon lets you “share” your quotes via Twitter you can actually integrate it with Evernote as well. I tend to be a private person, so not all of my saved quotes are for public consumption (yet) so use a direct message to @myen to get it into my Evernote account.

That might sound complex but it’s actually pretty simple. 
1) Set up your Evernote account to integrate with Twitter
2) Set up your Kindle to integrate with Twitter
3) then as you’re reading in Kindle, hit ALT+Return to “share” and type in the following:

d @myen

From there whatever quote you highlighted will head straight for your Evernote account.

Well, not exactly. It ends up as a link that looks something like this:

With that in your Evernote account, click the link then do the good-old “Paste to Evernote” clip I outlined above. That’s a long process from the sound of it, but I’m thinking it’s a huge time saver compared to manually going back through a book to type in good notes, know what I mean?

5) Everywhere else . . .
Lastly, if I’m in a productive meeting, hear a great sermon, or one of my very clever friends starts waxing eloquent, I often grab quotes straight into my Moleskine journal or a small Field Notes pocket journal I carry with me at all times. The same handwritten code applies here as it does to books: the square “to-do” box with the quotes around it.

The critical part of this system is getting them from your journal or notebook into Evernote. So I’ve built it into my GTD “Weekly Review” process . . . to go back through my journal and scrub for any quotes I need to enter into Evernote for later. Once you get into the habit of doing this every week, it doesn’t feel right skipping it - and you get the pleasure of crossing off those quote-boxes like finished to-do items once they’re in there!

I supposed if I had good enough hand-writing I could scan in my notes every week and let Evernote do the searching, but that’s not likely going to happen. Also, I suppose you could use the iPhone app in Evernote to take an audio note and record the sound clip while someone is talking - but that doesn’t end up converted into searchable text, so probably not very practical.

Okay, you’ve got all that great stuff into Evernote now; what are you going to do with it? I’ll tackle part two of the quote-magic on another day: Processing Quotes in Your Inbox.
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