My Evernote Story: Passed Notes

Great marketers have a special relationship with their products. My relationship with Evernote started on my birthday in 2011 when my gift to myself was to be a better manager. I started using the app to take meeting notes and capture “to do’s” from one-to-ones with my team. It was a basic use case, but I was determined to record action items, follow-up, and start with agendas. On my birthday this year, I looked back at those first notes and was underwhelmed by my organization, to say the least:

Like most of our power users, it took some time to benefit fully from being more organized, but I stuck with my system. One-to-one meetings became more productive when I referenced the next steps we’d agreed to the week before, and more got done. My team launched an SMS channel where we’d been stalled for months and we were running more growth experiments. I was excited about the success the team was having, and then ... my dad died.

Relationships with products evolve, just like relationships with people. In that moment, my relationship with my little family changed as I became the oldest male, and how I used Evernote changed as well. I needed all the questions for the doctors and the wills for the lawyers available to me on any device, but I also needed a place to offload the emotions I was feeling. The next thing I knew, I was writing Dad’s eulogy in what became the “Passed Note.”

My relationship with Evernote was no longer just one of digital post-it notes; it became the home for my ideas and memories that I constantly returned to. Not a lot of products can be so valuable in daily work and at the same time be the repository for lifelong emotions, and that’s why I was so excited to come be part of the larger Evernote story.

After six years without Dad and seven years using Evernote, my relationships continue to evolve. I’m now a father myself with two little kids, and my organization has improved a lot, even as my life has become more chaotic. Unlike my first note which was just typed text, I now employ pictures, annotated scans, checklists, handwriting and uploaded docs. My notes act as the glue keeping my ideas and all the input I get each day connected.

I now use Evernote to shape my future as much as remember the past. It is the home for my plans and dreams for the next generation: my daughter's sonogram and my son's first drawing (he literally did it in Evernote on my Microsoft Surface)! I'm hoping my past notes become my passed notes to the next generation.

What notes will you pass along?