If you are anything like me your mind is constantly churning out ideas, thoughts, projects, lists, things to do a million other things you have trouble remembering and keeping track of.

If you run a business, this is especially true. If you write a blog….true. If you aspire to creating a business, if you are writing a book, if you are designing a new website….well, the list goes on and on.

I have always been a paper tablet guy. I go through dozens of tablets a year. Many, many times nosey people who just can’t stand it anymore finally break down and ask “What are you doing there?” It irritates the hell out of me to be honest. I don’t want to be rude and say “none of your business” (which it is), so I usually just smile and say something like “trying to keep my head above water.”

The problem is that these endless pieces of paper I create are impossible to reference just when I need to. Finding one of my “Aha” ideas in my piles of papers and tablets is a non starter. Several years ago I stumbled upon a free tool which solved that problem. It is called Evernote.

Wikipedia describes Evernote as “Evernote is a cross-platform, freemium app designed for note taking, organizing, and archiving.” Hell I couldn’t have said it better myself.

When you get an idea just type it out, tag it so you can find it again (“writing idea,” “sales,” “blog post”) and throw it in a Notebook(see below). I have all sorts of notebooks and use lots of tags. That way you can sort of be double sure of finding an obscure note.

Some examples of my notebooks are:

• 2017 Business Plan
• Topics
• Ad ideas
• Campaign ideas
• Blog Posts
• Success Journal
• Recruiting ideas
• Personal

Each of those notebooks are full of individual notes on those topics and each of those notes is tagged with cross referenceing tags that come to mind as I am creating them. Starting to see?

It is pretty hard to lose something. It is also fun to go back and go through them when you are looking for inspiration or things to do.

One more thing. This tool is not only free, it is cross-platform. I have it on my laptop, my iPhone and my iPad. They all sync. Pull out your iPhone and dictate a note, tag it and file it and you have it on all of your devices.

Your own organized file cabinet. I wish my real file cabinet was this organized, lol.

I’m guessing there are other tools like this out there but this one is the one I use and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Get it at Evernote.com.

TIP: It is also a great place to stash PDFs and articles you want to save or read in the future.