Things I do with Evernote: Part II
The Life Stack.
I've got four notebooks in this stack, so far. I'm only using the first two of them, though I occasionally stare regretfully at the others.
- Exersize
- Journal
- Pic-a-Day
- Poem-a-Day
Exersize:
The Exersize (spelling intentional) notebook is a record of my daily, weekly, and monthly progress, or lack therefore of. I've discovered that I'm more motivated to exercise when I keep track of what I do. Especially if I do it in a public way (like I am on Twitter), so that stopping would be a bit embarrassing.
I'm using three apps to do this at the moment. The Moves app records my steps and general movements over the day, then estimates what I've done. I use Runmeter to record dedicated exercise time, walks for the most part. And I use Numbers to put it all in a couple of spreadsheets so I can easily see how I'm progressing.
All of this ends up in Evernote.
Runmeter is cool. It has a feature that emails my stats after every walk, automatically. I just point this at my Evernote address. I can't edit the Subject line of the email, so it goes to the inbox. When I clear my inbox (most nights) I tag it, tweak the subject line, and move it to the right notebook.
The Moves app is not as easy, though they are promising better export features. At this time all you can do is send a jpg of the summary bubble or the entire timeline. It's pretty, but you don't get all the data. This is more trouble to send, but does not require any extra steps in Evernote itself. I choose the Mail option and pick my Evernote email address. In the subject line I use a keyboard shortcut that not only becomes the title, but specifies what notebook and tags I want; a little editing to enter the number of steps, and I'm done.
I use a similar method to send just the top part (the Summary Bubble) to a Twitter post using the IFTTT tool in my previous post.
Finally, at the end of each month I take screen shots of the month's worksheets in Numbers, for both Runmeter and Moves, and save them in the notebook as well. If I actually manage to keep this up I'll eventually add a yearly summary as well. This is what the last few days look like in the notes list.
Journal:
Originally I figured the Journal notebook would be yet another half hearted and soon abandoned attempt at a standard journal. And it started that way, with only two entries. Since I discovered IFTTT I'm starting to think of it in another way. A repository for logs and other quick notes about life events, important or mundane. The key is that it has to be ridiculously easy or even automatic. So far I've only started using the SMS and Notes logs I shared in the IFTTT post, but I'm considering other stuff like an automatic Instagram archive and personal emails. Time will tell.