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Hello, everybody. This is Scott Bradley from www.scottbradley.name. And, in this video, I'm
going to share with you something that I do in my Evernote that really helps me manage all the
multiple, different conversations that I have with people: what we talk about, how I keep track
of it all, how I organize it, and, most importantly, how it helps me be more effective and more
productive in remembering things and also keeping a clear mind.
But, before I get into that, I want to share with you something that came up in one of the
comments in my previous video about the sticky notes notebook, whether it was the delete later
or the tasks or whatnot. There was someone that left a comment with a piece of feedback that
reminded me about one of the features that I wanted to show you before we actually jumped
into the main reason why I'm creating this video for you now.
So, if you remember the previous video on sticky notes, if you haven't already watched it, be
sure to go back to the channel and watch the video that talks about how to eliminate all the big
yellow sticky notes on your desk. But anyway, from that video, one person reminded me that
there's this feature that allows you to create a list within a note, and I want to show you how
that is and if I were to set this system up for myself, where I would put it and how I would make
it effective for me. I don't currently do this, but as we get deeper into these videos, and as I
share more about how I use Evernote and how it helps me be more effective every day, I'm still
going to do videos like this based on the feedback that I do get in the comments.
Another thing that I want to make clear is that, I really appreciate the people that have already
reached out to me, that have shared with me what they do and what they're planning to use
Evernote for. I've gotten a lot of great feedback, so be sure to send anything to me. I'm here,
I'm listening, and I'm really looking forward to what you have to say, if you haven't already
done so. Again, all that information is in two videos ago, the title of that video is Exciting
Announcement + Alert, so go watch that video if you're not sure what I'm talking about. But,
other than that, let's jump into this.
So, as someone already said and reminded me, they told me that you could create an actual list
within Evernote. And, when they said I'm like, oh shoot, I totally forgot to include that in the
previous video. So, I wanted to show that to you now. So, if I were to do what this person was
explaining, here's how I would set it up:
As you know, when you first get into Evernote, you have your main notebook, and this is
basically the notebook that is set up as you get into Evernote. And, I like to rename this
notebook as inbox, with the stars and everything. So, I know that if I email something, that's
where it's going to land. I believe it starts off as your username that you select, but you can go
on and rename it. And, I'm just going to show you how to do that. Just click this little arrow
and press rename, and then a little thing pops up for you to change it. So, that's the first thing
that I would do. So, I would first name this inbox.
Second thing that I would do is, then put today's to-dos in my inbox, specifically. Now, if you
wanted to create another notebook for this, you could. It really depends on how you use your
inbox, whether you keep it completely clean, in that case this would work. Otherwise, you may
want to create another notebook with this today's to-dos, and this is really simple, guys. So,
again, we're in the web version, what you want to do is click the little pencil here and that
opens up the editing box. And, if you notice up here at the top, you have bold, italicize,
underline, subscript, superscript, all the text-based stuff, but you have this little button here.
And, what's interesting is that it allows you to add as many little checkmark boxes as possible.
So, all I'm doing here is I'm clicking, pressing enter, clicking, pressing enter, clicking,
pressing, enter. And what's interesting about this is that you can actually put the list item one,
click there, list item two, to-do, go to the car wash, whatever it is, and you can actually come
back here and go click, click, and press done, and then it shows them checked off. And then,
you can come in here and edit it again, click, click, whatever we want to do here.
Now, what's great about it is you can also delete those. So, you can go, delete, delete, delete,
delete. So, one of the concerns that the person brought up in the previous video about the sticky
notes in the comments was, I would rather create a note with this checklist instead of creating
individual notes within one notebook for all my tasks, because they were afraid it was going to
get too cumbersome. So, I wanted to show this to you as another potential option that you could
use for yourself. And, the two different places that you could place this note is, again, in the
inbox, or you could create a new notebook, depending on your behavior and how you're using
your inbox. And, as you watch all these videos and we get deeper and deeper into this, you're
going to find the way that you groove with how you use Evernote to be effective. So, I wanted
to share that with you before we actually jumped into the main purpose for today's video in
helping you manage-I'll just tell you a story.
As I was building my business, as I was managing multiple different conversations, everything
from lead based conversations, to client based conversations, to conversations where I was
talking to someone more than once, I had to find a way to manage all the notes from
everything. And, I actually really started with a yellow notepad. And, if you can image my
yellow notepad, rather than having it be from top to bottom, I would switch it to be more
horizontal and draw lines down the center of every page. And, at the top of each of those
sections, you can imagine, I would have the person's name, the day that I spoke to them, and
maybe a couple notes about that person. And then, maybe a couple days would go by, I'd have
another conversation with another person, not the same person. I'd have their notes on the next
thing, and then I kept turning the pages and turning the pages, and it just got overwhelming.
And, I got to a point where I'm like, I've got to find a better way. And thank God Evernote
came into my life because it has really allowed me to effectively take notes on the
conversations that I have with people, and know that they're there when I need them to
reference them, and I don't have to keep the information circling in my mind.
So, in this video, again, I'm going to show you the framework of how I set that up. So, I like to
call this notebook the people pad. So, as you see, go to notebooks, arrow, new notebook, people
pad. Because in some instances I may be dealing with different contexts of people- so say, for
instance, you are a serial entrepreneur and you have multiple different projects, multiple
different companies, you have different conversations with people for each different company,
and you want to actually par that out and separate that out. You would want to have a stacked
notebook of people that I'm going to show you how to structure that right now.
Again, new notebook, let's just put this Company One, save. And then, as you guys know, to
stack it you just click it, drag it on top, let it go. We're going to just name this people pad
name, save. So, as you see, people pad name, Company One. And then, we're just going to
rename this one as Company Two. So, again, this is if you have different contexts of people
within the scope of the conversations that you have. If that is not you, I would recommend that
you just do one notebook, and let's just make it people pad non-serial entrepreneur, save.
So, I'm going to show this first, and then I'm going to show how I would structure this. And
basically, in showing you this, it will carry over to this and it will make sense to you. So, in
doing this, what I would do is, every single time that I would have a conversation with
somebody, again, if I was running business only with one type, one group of people that I was
going after, whether it was leads, prospects, customers, whatever.
Again, I would create a new note, let's just say I'm talking to my buddy John. You know, I
talked awhile and we're in the process of getting into business together, or he wants to buy my
services or vice versa. What I would do is, I would make a note and just title this John. And,
how I would structure this is that I would basically say, okay, today is July 4, 2013, here's what
we talked about: note one, note two, note three, star, star, star, website, check out, you get the
idea. Now, that was my conversation that I had with John, and, as you know, this pops up there.
Now, going back in and editing it, say that I had another conversation with John. What I do is, I
actually pop this line up here. Actually, there's this really cool little tool here in Evernote, it's
right here. I just put this little line there, click above, scroll down. I go, say that we talked on
July 7, 2013, note one, note two, note three, you get the idea. Now, one of the other things that I
also like to do as I take these conversations and do these conversations with people, is that,
normally, throughout the calls there are a lot of action items that come from them, so I always
like to highlight them with a star A, make sure to call person X, whatever we decided.
So, I wanted to share that little tip with you that as I'm taking my notes, I always either put an
A and a circle around it if I'm writing it down, or if I'm in Evernote and I'm taking notes as I'm
talking to this person, that's how I make it apparent to me, and you can come in here and you
can bold it, whatever you want to do. So, the key here is that it gives you the logical
progression of the conversations that you have with these people in a reverse chronological
order, to the point where, the most recent conversations are on top and the older conversations
are near the bottom. So, you can actually see, as you start going deeper and deeper, whether
they're a prospect or they're a customer, it really is going to change depending on how deep or
how big or how wide or how small or short they are based on your conversations.
Now, taking it a step further-and you don't have to do this, but I'm just throwing it out there.
I don't do it for myself, but depending on what business you're in and how you're using
Evernote for yourself, this may be valuable to you given the nature of your business. One of the
things that may be valuable to you is that, I would add a tagging structure so that you would
always be able to manipulate where-say you're in a business where you're generating a lot of
leads, you're doing a lot of cold reach outs, and the context of the lead changes over time. This
may be able to help you as well. What I would do is in the case of being in a very, I have to
prospect a lot of people, I have to talk to a lot of people, etcetera,
I would do a tagging structure.
And, here's how I would make my tagging structure: I would put-peeps would be the main
category header, where, if you watched the second video that I did about managing all the ideas
that you get and the brained up notebook, again, very valuable video, highly recommend you go
watch that. I would make the title of this tag peeps, and then, I'd go prospect would be one of
them, and I'm going to just press enter. That makes it a tag. Another tag that I would also use,
peeps customers, press enter. I would also do peeps vendors. And, as far as I'm concerned,
those are the only two that I would start with.
Not to make things too complex, but maybe you could also do different, deeper levels of
prospects. Where, say-let's just delete this one for now-say you have different levels of
prospects. Where you have, we'll just do peeps prospect low, peeps prospect medium, peeps
prospect hot. So, it would really allow you to track all of your people in that, okay let's just say
done here. So, this is tagged and as you can see here, the tags show up at the bottom here. And
so, let's say that you have done a lot of this lead generation. You have, let's just put another,
let's do Sally as another person in here. Now, let's say that you have, let's just tag her with
peeps. Now, it's really cool because it automatically fills once you create these. And, let's just
say she is a medium level prospect, we're going to just say done.
What's really cool about this now, if you can think of the work flow of how you're going to
work is, that you could say, okay, I want to follow up with all of my prospects right now. So,
you can click people, whatever the notebook title that you have, again, I probably recommend
people pad, and then you can come down here to, okay, I want to see all of my low level
prospects or my medium level prospects that I'm working right now. Click it, boom. And, John
is obviously going to show up there. Let's just see the low, I only want to see low.
So, John shows up as a low, and if you remember, just for illustration purposes, I tagged him
with that one only. But, as you see here, you can kind of create this contextual, CRM, active,
you looking at this every day, this is you working your pipeline, this is you working how you
flow with people. And, in later videos, I'm definitely going to show you one of my really cool
ways that you can manage an entire funnel with this type of stuff. But, this is just the basics for
now, and then as we dive deeper, I'm going to go deeper into detail about if you really want to
take this whole thing to the next level, how you can do that.
Going back to the main thing, make sure that you create each note as the person's name. Make
sure you do reverse chronological order. So, let's say the next conversation that I have with
John, this is going to here, you have the line thing you can pop up, and enter, boom. This is
going to be July 13, 2013, so on and so on, you get the idea. So, reverse chronological order is
key. Using the tags and you can tag this person with certain things, again these are going to
depend on the context of your business.
And, one of the main reasons why I asked you guys to reach out to me, and again, that's in that
previous video that I mentioned at the early part of this video, is because I am going to really
go all out when I do help you. In that video, I asked you, send me the question: if you were in
this business, or if you were this kind of person in this profession, how would you structure
your Evernote? I'm going to go deep, to the deepest level in my videos for you guys to show
you how I can give you that detailed, nitty-gritty stuff. So again, do please reach out to me if
you do want help with that.
And, as you start getting used to these videos and kind of how my approach is, you're going to
get more information to learn from, so you can change and tweak something that I'm doing and
make it better for yourself. I can only be so general here because I'm giving you guys the big
framework and the context, but again, in those later videos, after I exhaust all this context stuff,
then that's when it's going to get really fun.
So, just a quick little recap here, I know that was a piece of feedback that someone wanted me
to do. As you know, you have the ability to go in here and create these little to-do list items.
Again, depending on whether you keep your inbox clean or it's busy, is going to depend on
where you put this today's to-dos. If you have a full inbox all the time, I recommend you do a
single notebook and just have it be a to-do notebook with that one note specifically. And, if you
remember what's really great about this is, it would allow you to click here and drag, and
actually put it up in the to-dos. So, even if you did have a busy inbox, you would still be able to
click and drag this item up to the top left and it would be able to show you the actual note itself,
which is great, very, very convenient here. Otherwise, you can either create a new notebook or
whatever works best for you.
And, secondly in the review, I want to make sure that you have each person that you talk to-
again, I'm just assuming you're in one business type, if you're in two business types, you can
probably imagine how it would be done as well. And, the one little tweak I would make is, let's
just use a Michael as an example. One of the tweaks I would make is, if you are one of those
serial entrepreneurs and you are having multiple different conversations within your different
companies, I would make my tagging structure, peeps Company One low. So, you can see how
that goes, so the next one is, peeps Company Two medium. So, you can see how it can be going
deep-oh this is actually sorry, this is peeps Company One medium, right?
So, you want to keep the contextual, detailed, granular stuff in the same mental framework. So,
you can know, okay, Company One, I want to see the Company One needs of these prospects. I
want to dive deep and be able to granularly show them to myself, so I can reference them and
reach out to them again.
Another thing, as I'm remembering and we're wrapping this one video up, make sure to put
John's contact information at the top here. So, at the very top, you definitely want a main
email, phone number, and any other information that you really want there, so that you can
always reference it quickly if you need to reference it. And, the best thing is that, even though
you may not have his cell phone number in your phone as your contacts, Evernote does come
up on your cell phone. So, you can turn that on, log in, and if you needed that number really
quickly, it would be very easy for you.
So, I really hope that you enjoyed this video. Again, I did reference a couple videos in this
video. So, if you haven't already watched those, please go do so. Again, I'm really serious
about me wanting to help you. If you are in either a different type of business, if you're a
different profession, I'm really looking forward to hearing from you because I only have so
much content that I can give you from my personal experience. But, where the real magic
happens is when someone comes to me and says, hey I'm in this business, I have Evernote, I
don't know how to optimize my experience in what I'm doing, how would you set it up? And,
like I said, that's when those videos are going to get great.
So, like I said, the title of that one video is Exciting Announcement + New Alert. So, again,
click at the bottom of this video. You're going to see evernotescott next to the subscribe button,
just click that. Go to the video library and then click that Exciting Announcement + Alert video,
and you're going to learn more about that stuff in there.
My contact email is in there, the whole nine yards.
So, again, I know this video was a little long, it was a little all over the place, but it's really all
about giving you the value so that you can leverage this for yourself. Again, I really thank you
for your time and attention, I look forward to the next video. I really hope that you guys like
this two videos per week so far. I'm having fun thinking about the content that I'm creating for
you guys, and other than that, I hope you have a great week and a fantastic rest of your day.
Have a good one, talk to you soon, bye.
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