Evernote: A Seminarian’s Best Friend

I’m terrible at organizing. Well, that’s not quite right. I can come up with brilliant systems of organization, but I often just never implement them. This bad habit has followed me throughout my life.

It was easier when school consisted of clearly laid-out assignments. In my college years, however, is when it became more difficult. I was responsible for keeping track of class assignments, due dates, notes, breaking larger long-term assignments into smaller tasks, and getting things done.

My world had gained a huge sense of clarity with a little-known program called Journlr. It allowed me to make digital notebooks and notes for all parts of my life. For some reason, it just worked for me. I used it for everything: taking notes for class, recording audio of lectures, and keeping track of blog posts and other forms of writing. I would even use the video capture to record me playing different guitar lines I didn’t want to forget. It was so helpful.

And then it shut down.

I wandered around the wilderness for some time, using the outdated program as long as I could. Then one day, I updated my computer, and it couldn’t run anymore.

I searched for a replacement, and I eventually settled on the program that I probably use more often than any other: Evernote.

Evernote 101

If you’re in seminary (or ministry), you might want to check out Evernote, too. There are many benefits Evernote can offer to those in ministry or theological education. But in this first section, I’ll just provide a brief overview and talk about my favorite feature.

What is Evernote?

First, if you don’t know, Evernote, most simply, is a note-taking application. You set up digital notebook “stacks” with different digital notebooks inside and write digital “notes” in those notebooks.

These “notes” are blank canvases on which you can do nearly anything. You can throw in pictures, videos, audio, text, and files, many of which the program can “read” and make searchable. It can even make handwritten notes and text in photographs searchable.

In addition to this, they have many more features you may or may not use. Built-in chat, “shared” notes and notebooks, the ability to use a stylus to hand-write notes. So now that we know what it is, how can it help us?

Mobility

The Evernote desktop application is incredibly powerful, but one of the beauties of using Evernote is that it is available everywhere. Everything from tablets to smartwatches all have Evernote apps that enable you to both collect and recall information on the go wherever.

The modern pastor and seminarian are both increasingly mobile. Pastoral conversations and seminary studying happens now in such varied places: coffee-shops, church campuses, conferences, denominational meetings, libraries, parks, and in cars, trains, planes, and busses in between all of these places, too.

At every one of these places, you will have the chance to receive wisdom, go over notes, find sermon illustrations, and have meditations. Evernote lets you capture these things on the fly. Take voice memos, pictures, and notes. Also, if you find yourself in a particular pastoral moment, you can easily recall any relevant information to offer that might be of assistance to others.

And not only that, it’s free! Doesn’t get better than that. In the next section, I’ll provide a deeper look at a few other favorite features and benefits.

Evernote 201

In this section, I want to show some of the slightly deeper highlights to using this app in a seminary or ministry context.

Note-Taking (Together?)

This may seem obvious, but the best thing to use this app for is taking notes. It’s a great digital version of taking the notes we all used to do with handwriting. When I first started using the app in college, I’d run the built-in audio recorder to record the lecture as I would type along with it. And so, I’d end up having one note with the lecture audio up top and the notes below.

Also, more recent updates to Evernote have introduced “Shared” Notes and Notebooks. With these, you can collaborate with your classmates on Notes or whole Notebooks dedicated to courses you share. This crowd-sourcing of notes can be incredibly helpful, especially in a ministry context, where community is so necessary.

Clipping

One of my favorite features is the ability to “clip” things off of the web when you come across them. I have a whole folder dedicated to sermon illustrations. Whenever I’m surfing the web or on my phone, if I run across something that will make a good illustration, I will screen capture it or “clip” that particular part of the web page for later.

Connecting

For the techies out there, Evernote has an API, which means that it can talk to other programs, services, and apps. You can integrate it into a huge number of other services you probably use.

My favorite feature here, though, is its integration with the service IFTT. With IFTT, you connect all of your services and devices and you make “recipes,” following an “If this, then that” formula. For example, “If I meet someone new and add them to my phone contacts, add the date, time, and location I met them to an Evernote note.” How useful is that for pastors?

There are tons of these sorts of recipes for Evernote, which you can use to augment your learning, preaching, teaching, and pastoring.

Searching

Lastly, everything in Evernote is powerfully searchable. For most of seminary’s existence, can you imagine how much seminary learning has been lost within the first 1 to 5 years after graduation? Probably a lot, and and not just Greek and Hebrew.

If you’ve graduated from seminary, how many lectures would you love to be able to recall while preparing your sermons or other educational moments in your church?

With Evernote, you can.

Do everything from take a picture of the whiteboard after a lecture to record the audio to scan in handouts with your phone or simply type your notes out. Everything becomes searchable. You can add tags to your notes like “Old Testament,” “Ephesians,” “Transcendent Moments,” “Authors to Read,” etc., and never forget them.

Simply search for it on your phone, computer, tablet, web browser, or smartwatch, and you’ll have it right there.