EverNote: A Free and Easy Program to Organize Your Files

I am something of an article packrat. Whenever I come across an article that's interesting or informative, there's a good chance I'll save it to read again later.

As a result, I had hundreds of articles saved to my hard drive. In fact, I had so many saved articles, I hardly knew what half of them were. Then, if I did need a specific article, I had trouble finding it.

Then I found EverNote.

EverNote is a program for Windows that makes dealing with all the information you've accumulated quick and easy. And, best of all, it's free.

What Is EverNote?

EverNote is a note management system, or personal information manager. And that's what it does. Help you to manage and organize your information.

I've tried dozens of personal information managers (or PIMs) over the years, but few of them have been as easy to use as EverNote.

Organizing Your Files

EverNote makes organizing your personal files a breeze.

With a lot of Personal Information Managers, you have to move your notes, articles, reports and emails into them manually, opening each file, highlighting the text, then cutting and pasting it into the PIM.

You can do that with EverNote, too. But you can also use the drag and drop feature.

To move a text or HTML file into the PIM, all you have to do is go open Windows Explorer, click on the file you want to move, and drag it over to EverNote. It's as simple as that. EverNote will even name the new "note" for you.

Using Categories to Stay Organized

With EverNote, you can quickly and easily assign categories and subcategories to each of your "notes." And you can change a note's category in seconds, without having to worry about moving the notes around manually.

Collecting New Information from the Web

With EverNote, collecting new information from the web is simple.

When you come across a web page that contains information you want to save, all you have to do is highlight that information, and click the "Add to EverNote" button that will have installed on your Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Outlook toolbar. The information will be added to EverNote in seconds. Assign a category to it, and the information will be easy to find when you need it.

EverNote has lots of other great features, like templates you can use to keep a To-Do list, great a shopping list, store phone messages, and keep track of your expenses. You can also save handwritten notes in EverNote.

There is a paid version of EverNote, which contains much more advanced features. But the more basic features offered by the free version are more than enough to help you start gaining control over the chaos on your hard drive.