Christopher S Penn August 10, 2012 12 Comments

The simplest productivity feature in Evernote I didn’t know

If you’re an avid fan of the Evernote application, then you’ll appreciate this little-publicized feature that Chel Wolverton pointed out to me.

Take any text list on either your mobile Evernote or your desktop Evernote and hit the checkbox button, once at the beginning of each line, and voila! Instant checklist that you can tap or click to check items off as you’ve done them.

Desktop version:

Mobile Version (iPad):

Mobile Version (iPhone):

If you already use Evernote anyway, this is a great, simple, and easy tip to make it even more powerful for managing to-do lists and more.

What are your favorite simple Evernote productivity tips?

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Filed Under: Productivity

http://iangordon.me Ian Gordon

Love this tip! (I’m a pretty big fan of pickles too)
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=602454941 Bob Reed

In the words of the late Johnny Carson, “I did not know that…”
http://www.stevenwb.com swbuehler

Failed to add: This feature is also available on the Android version, but NOT on the version for BlackBerry Playbook (the playbook converts everything to plain text; it really needs an update–you listening, @Evernote?!?)
abelniak

Two huge things that I love… [1] the evernote screen clipper as Chrome extension; [2] determining what your ‘secret’ evernote email address is, so you can archive/save useful/important content that you might get via email, and route it to Evernote, w/o having to c/p it.
- http://twitter.com/stephanhov Stephan Hovnanian
  
  the email feature is fabulous…I Bcc: it in client communication for important emails so I have a central place to access the info (that ISN’T my inbox). Did you know you could put hashtags in the subject line and they’ll convert to tags?
  - http://www.ChristopherSPenn.com Christopher S. Penn
    
    Very nice!
http://allmarketingsolutions.co.uk/social-media-marketing-services Ayaz

Excellent post and worthy reading this and certainly I never read like this before and you have provided it with a great idea. Thanks for sharing great knowledge
Scott Ellis

Checklists in Evernote are awesome because it keeps your todo’s in the context of the notes in which they were created. One downside is that you don’t get a standalone consolodated list. However I’ve started using Egretlist on my iPhone for that and it’s wonderful, integrates nicely with Evernote.

You can also use the search operators in Evernote to find notes with open todo’s in them by just typing todo:true in the Evernote search bar. Helpful stuff!!!
- http://www.andytraub.com/ Andy Traub
  
  Is Egrelist like CheckEver converting them to todo lists?
http://danieljohnsonjr.com/ danieljohnsonjr

I create a note for dates work needs to be done. That way I can scan the notebook to see when I have work due. The checkboxes really help.

I’ve also been using the recorder for recording notes, sometimes with the speech to text functionality. I just wish there was a way to edit the Evernote audio.
http://twitter.com/rohnjaymiller Rohn Jay Miller

There’s a couple of design flaws in the “checkbox” function on Evernote. One that bit me when I created my first “to do” list was that I first built the list, then highlighted all the items, then pressed the checkbox button on the toolbar. In Windows this would have added a checkbox in front of each item–as in Word, for example. My result? All 30 items were deleted (forever) and replaced with a single checkbox. (D’oh!)

1. Evernote should allow “checkboxing” using the Windows (and Apple) paradigm of highlighting, clicking the box, adding a checkbox in front of each highlighted item.

2. Evernote should have some form of “back” button for this use case and for all other use cases.

Second problem with the checkbox function in Evernote is that the checkboxes are simply cosmetic. You can check them, but they don’t remove/archive the checked item.

3. There should be *options* in Evernote to keep a checked item in the note (as it is now,) archive the item, or delete the item.

I’ve reposted this to Evernote, just adding it here for further context.

Thanks for pointing this out Chris–RJ
- http://www.andytraub.com/ Andy Traub
  
  Evernote is adding some more controls to this feature in 2013 and you can use an iPhone app called CheckEver to view notes in todo list format on your phone. Very slick.