You can follow us here for announcements, tutorials and tips related to Egretlist.  We hope that we can help you exploit all the benefits of using Egretlist with Evernote, including that they are fun to use together.

You may be new to Evernote and Egretlist, so here is a quick overview of them both, and how they work together:

What is Evernote?

Evernote is a note taking application that works on your computer, mobile devices and the web.  It lets you write and capture many things, for example:

• Write rich-text notes from the desktop and browser
• Add website clippings, which are sections of a website that interest you.
• Take pics with your mobile phone and save them as a note
• Record audio notes
• Scan documents as notes and store them in notes

For all this content, Evernote lets you add checkboxes besides them to indicate that it is related to something that you need to do.  Here is an example:

What is Egretlist?

Egretlist is a to-do app with a very particular trait: It works with Evernote by using Evernote notes with checkboxes to generate to-do lists for you.

You might think: “Wait, this is crazy!  Why would I want to use notes as to-do lists?”

Well, you have probably done it before, but you don’t remember:

1. You may have printed out a recipe on the Internet, then went to the grocery store to buy all the items in the “Ingredients” section, checking them off as you go.
2. You may have taken class notes that included several books to read.  The professor asked you to read one of them, so you wrote READ THIS with an asterisk besides the book title.
3. You may have wanted  to buy several computer peripherals, so you stored their store URLs in a text file to check them out later.

We think that this is the best way to make your to-do lists: embedding them in the actual content that relates to what you need to do.  The beauty of this approach is that you seldom need to type, you just collect what you need to do from several sources, copy/paste them into one or several notes, and put checkboxes into each item. In the case of things clipped from the Internet, it is even simpler: you just clip the web-page using Evernote and add checkboxes where needed.  When you synchronize them to Egretlist, the checkboxes appear as a tidy list with all their content easily accessible.

Now you can have your notes and to-do lists in a central place

And you can do so any way you want, with a very flexible system:

Evernote lets you organize your notes in notebooks and tags. Notebooks are like folders for your notes, while tags help you search for notes later.  Many people organize their notes in different ways, for example:

•  Tag notes to identify what kind of activity the note represents (fun, work, research, vacation)
•  Tag notes to identify at what situation the note is relevant (@home, @car, @bored)
•  Use a notebook for each project that you are working on, another for archiving, another for inspiration.

Since Egretlist lists are Evernote notes with checkboxes, these techniques apply.  Even better, since your notes and to-dos are in the same place, you don’t need to organize them using separate systems.  You can come up with your own creative ways to organize yourself, but we also suggest some guidelines that we know work really great, so you can use some of our ideas.  We will discuss them in a future post, so stay tuned.

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