Loud Thinking December 17, 2013 at 03:23PM

Use Note-Taking Apps to Prioritize

With the remarkable retrieval capacity of digital note-taking apps, you can always find (and remember) your records of important conversations and meetings. Better still, thoughtfully organizing your notes will help you focus on your top priorities and drive your energies toward your most important work. In Evernote ( OneNote, Springpad, and SimpleNote are other popular apps), create notebooks that are as broad as possible while still reflecting specific projects and responsibilities; rather than “XYZ account,” for example, use “Key Industries” or “West Coast Prospects.” Evernote automatically organizes notebooks alphabetically, but any notebooks that have names beginning with punctuation or symbols (“!ManagementTips”) show up at the top of the list, followed by names beginning with numbers. Use this to your advantage: name notebooks to keep key priorities, projects, and responsibilities on top so that you’ll see and think about them every day.

Adapted by HBR from Work Smarter With Evernote by Alexandra Samuel.

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