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OK. I know what you’re thinking… all you need is yet another application that somehow helps you manage your life/hobbies/fetishes/whatever. Ever since the invention of the personal computer, there have been countless applications available to help you get your stuff together. But please, trust me on these two – you may find them useful, and best of all they’re free.

There are some people out there who are self-proclaimed OneNote junkies. For those of you who don’t know what “OneNote” is, it’s an organizational application from Microsoft (part of the Office suite on Windows) that has a large following amongst students. There’s good reason for it – the application functions as a virtual notebook where you can stuff all kinds of information into it in a semi-organized way, pretty much like a student would use a traditional notebook for. The plus side is that it takes more than text, including web pages, e-mails, pictures, and other files.

The downside for many is that it’s Windows-only, and it costs money, and either of those can be a deal-breaker for many users.

An alternative to OneNote is Evernote. It’s free, runs on both Windows and Mac OS X, and can also run on Android/iPhone/iPad as well as via the web. They also have a Blackberry app available, but sadly my ancient Pearl can’t run it. All of these vehicles for EverNote can sync with each other, so you could be running the application on your MacBook at work, adding clips or pages from your iPad at home, taking pictures on your  phone and adding them to the notebook while on a job site, and organizing your thoughts from the web browser on the PC in the hotel Business Center. It can even be setup so that you can forward an e-mail directly to your Evernote notebook, from your computer or mobile device. If you get into Evernote in a big way, you can sign up for a paid version with more capacity.

This is one of those applications that’s pretty much self-explanatory, and the best way to get familiar with it is just to simply sign up for the service, download the apps for your devices and computers, and run with it. One of the things I like is the Safari integration, so if I’m on a website and I want to throw the page into my notebook, all I have to do is click on the elephant button at the top. The plug-in will grab that page and sync it with Evernote, sticking it in whatever your default notebook is. Once it’s there, you can easily move it to another one of your notebooks if you prefer.

It will sync periodically, or you can manually force it to sync by hitting the Sync button on the upper left hand side of the application.

Here’s a sample notebook that I’m working on.

I’ve got a project where I’m building jigs for fabricating guitar necks, so I’m sticking ideas that I run across on the web into a notebook labeled “Neck Jig notebook”. There’s a YouTube video that looked interesting, some websites with tools that I might consider, a page with pictures of stuff that might be useful, and a To-Do list that I slapped together. The websites were captured with the plug-in, the list was just edited on a blank page, and the pictures were things that I just dragged from a website directly into a blank page. Mindlessly easy, which is good for me. Here’s a screen shot to give you an idea:



Here’s the same notebook when viewed on the web:



If you prefer, you can do a list view instead of the thumbnails. If there’s GPS data (e.g. iPhone pictures), it’ll get tagged onto the entry. If you want, you can make the notebooks shareable so that others can contribute to it, or link to other’s notebooks.  Again, not bad for free.

Some people are “list” people, and if you’re one of those, you could learn to love Reqall (pronounced “recall”). There are lots of applications and tools to help you keep lists, one of the best being a good pen and a scratch pad. But Reqall adds a couple twists in that make it very useful, including synching and smartphone apps in addition to the web application.

Speaking of phones, Reqall’s most notable feature is its voice-to-text capabilities, where you can add something to a list by simply speaking it. It sounds kinda silly at first, but often times I’ll be driving around and something will occur to me that I know I’ll want to remember later. With Reqall, all I have to do is call a phone number, leave a message, and it will transcribe it as a note that I can access later from my phone app or via the web. There are all kinds of tagging features available in Reqall, but if you used nothing else but the voice notes, you’ll find it to be a valuable tool for business.

Like Evernote, Reqall is a free service with an enhanced pay version available. It’s very simple to use, and anybody can figure it out within a few minutes, but that’s not to say that these tools aren’t powerful. The speech-to-text thing actually works pretty well, but no doubt you’ll be amused as you go back in to edit the notes.

To get started with these services, just cruise by their websites:

The price is right, and they’re easy to use, so why not give them a shot?