By Karen House, M.S., MT-BC
For me, organization is a desired but not-often-achieved skill. My typical style of cleaning is to move all the junk into one room and close the door. As a music therapist without a documentation program, I found it difficult to stay organized with session data. I tried using a word processor with homemade templates, handwritten notes, and a combination of the two; nothing I did was efficient or motivating enough. In my search for a program that might help, I stumbled upon Evernote.
On the surface, Evernote looks like a simple (free!) notes application. You write notes and keep them in notebooks, and you can even combine multiple notebooks and title the bound grouping. For example, I have notebooks named for each of my clients and combine them in the category of “Music Therapy.” Notes are basic and customizable: start with a title and add body text, check boxes, bullets or numbered lists, dividing lines, and even graphs. You can even insert pictures or full documents into a note as an attachment! This feature helped me immensely in organizing all my old client notes that I hand-wrote. All I needed to do was snap a picture from my phone and put it in a note. Even better- the search feature in Evernote is able to scan words in pictures and attached documents!
Here’s the thing that really sold me on Evernote: as an app and computer program, everything syncs with your account. I can write up session notes on my Macbook at home and reference them on my iPad or iPhone with a click of the “sync” icon. Even pictures and documents sync across devices, but attached documents will only download on other devices after you choose to retrieve them (great for saving data and space!).
If you’re worried about privacy, Evernote does not give you the option to password protect notes or notebooks (yet!!). However, you can encrypt selected text and choose a passphrase and this will sync across all devices.
There are so many features of Evernote and its sister apps that are incredibly fun and useful. We want to hear your ideas as well- leave a comment on how you use Evernote!