Conquer your paper clutter

Capture other important documents like passports, air tickets and receipts using a scanner or cellphone camera and they’ll be available long afterwards the originals are lost or faded.

Lot more than an archiving tool

Evernote is a lot more than an archiving tool. It’s as well a superb programme for organising your thoughts and recording them, without the added pressure of sharing them with the world on social networks, though it gives you the option to do so.

A “note” can take many forms – a piece of formatted text, a webpage, a photograph, a voice clip, or even a handwritten “ink” note. Notes can be sorted into folders, at that time tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, searched and exported. Evernote’s available for all major operating systems, smartphones and tablets. There’s a premium, paid version for power users, nevertheless the free version is more than adequate for most needs.

All computers, smartphones and tablets come with electronic calendars. Most let you link to an online calendar, like those offered by Google’s Gmail and Facebook, and synchronise this information on all your devices, so it isn’t lost if one crashes or goes missing.

An added bonus is that you can access this information from a range of devices, including most smartphones. I discovered just how useful this can be when I popped into a bank recently to close an unused credit card account. Afterwards queueing I was asked for details I didn’t have.

The past I’d have had to abort the exercise

In the past I’d have had to abort the exercise. Instead, out came my cellphone and within seconds I was using Sugarsync to browse the online backup of my home PC’s My Document folder and opening the required document.