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I like to use Evernote to organize my client information, including email correspondence. I detail this here: 7 Tips to Manage Client Info.

Forwarding Gmail to Evernote requires a paid account.

If you don’t have a paid Evernote account, you can still copy and paste an email into an Evernote note. But there are better ways if you’re a Gmail user.

Use the Chrome Evernote Web Clipper extension.

Here’s how: open the email, click on the Web Clipper extension in your Chrome toolbar, then save the email to any Evernote notebook that you choose.

Use Zapier.

Using this method you’ll be saving specific emails to a corresponding Evernote notebook automatically. You can read more about Zapier here: Easy Way to Sync Cloud Services.

1. Start by going to this webpage: Evernote/Gmail Integration. Log into your Zapier account (or create one).
2. Select the Gmail trigger. You can select from “New Mail Matching Search”, which I use as an example below, “New Labeled Email”, “New Starred Email”, etc.
3. Next, select the Evernote action. I use “Create Note” in my example.

You will have to connect your Gmail account. And then set up the parameters for a Gmail search (or choose a label, or other criteria). Then connect your Evernote account and choose options for notebook, title, note content, tag, etc.

This example sets up a “zap” to search for email from a specific customer/client, then save it to an Evernote notebook.

1. Select the Gmail trigger: “New Email Matching Search” and the Evernote trigger: “Create Note”.
2. After connecting your Gmail account, type “from:<customer name>” in the Search String.
3. Select the Evernote application and then “Create Note”.
4. After connecting your Evernote account, choose a notebook. (Select “Subject” under Title, and select “Body Plain” under Content.)

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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”

If you’re an avid Evernote user like me, you may find yourself with so many notes that you’re not sure what to do with them. If you’ve read my post here: Use Evernote for a New Level of Organization, you know how to use notebooks and tags for organized Evernote notes. But even with good organization, it’s just too easy to take a note during a meeting, during a conversation, or whenever you have a thought, and then have trouble knowing how to find it later.

For example, whenever anyone recommends a book to me, I’ll make a note and I’ll tag it “books”. Makes sense, right? Whenever I’m looking for a new book to read, I can just open Evernote and look at everything tagged “books”. However, my list of “books” notes had gotten quite long, and I’m not consistent with titles. So when I looked at the list, I had to look at each note to see what kind of book it’s all about.

I was not efficiently accessing my organized Evernote notes.

Here’s my solution:

1. I created a new note that is a “Table of Contents” note. It contains links to all of my “books” notes.
2. In my Book Table of Contacts note, I’ve added some simple organization in the form of  headers, “Memoirs”, “Fiction”, and “Non-fiction”.
3. I’ve moved my notes links around to be under the corresponding headers.

You can create an Evernote Table of Contents note a couple of different ways.

The basic way is to create a new note, title it “XXX Table of Contents” and copy/paste the links of the relevant notes into it. (You can copy the link of a note by right-clicking the note and selecting “Copy Note Link”.)

A quick and easy way to create a new TOC note is to select the notes that you want to include. Evernote will then show you a couple of options when you do this, including “Create Table of Contents Note”.

Rename the note, give it a tag, and edit it to add headers.

Now you can see your organization at a glance and choose the note that you want to look at.

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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”

In my blog post here: How to Prioritize Email, I wrote about prioritization methods for your inbox.

Use your email daily priorities method with your Evernote to-do list as well

Organize your tasks separately from your reference notes/emails in Evernote. You can do this by using Evernote notebooks. (Read about notebooks here: How to Organize Using Evernote Notebooks.)

“Getting Things Done” (or GTD) is a popular productivity method. This was first made popular by David Allen’s book in 2001. The GTD system requires that you process your information through utilizing an “action management system”. The flow goes like this:

1. Examine each item
2. Is it actionable?
3. If not,
   • trash it, or
   • move it to a “someday/maybe” list, or
   • move it to a reference list.
4. If it is actionable, determine if it will take less than 2 minutes. If yes, take care of the action. If not, delegate it or schedule it for later.

Use Evernote notebooks for both actionable and non-actionable lists

Create an Evernote notebook for “Someday/Maybe” items and another one for “Reference”. You can also create notebooks for your items that you delegated or scheduled for later. Name the notebooks something like “Next Actions” and “Waiting For”. Use reminders to help you to schedule your actions.

Use Evernote tags for daily priorities

The next level of organization for your tasks in your “Next Actions” notebook is to assign priority tags. If you’re using the Eisenhower method, for example, your tags can be “A.UI” (Urgent and Important), “B.UNI” (Urgent, Not Important), “C.INU” (Important, Not Urgent), and “D.NINU (Not Important, Not Urgent). Sort your notes and emails in the notebook by priority tag.

I recommend that you integrate your email tasks with your Evernote to-do list. Integrating email with a task manager means that your daily priorities will then be in one place. If you have an Evernote Plus account, you can forward emails to one of your notebooks. You’ll do this by forwarding to your Evernote email address and appending “@<notebook name>” to the email title, followed by “#<priority tag>”.

Have a routine

Check your “Next Items” and “Waiting For” notebooks daily. Remove notes as you complete them, add new items, and update tags & reminders. You should also allocate time weekly to check your “Someday/Maybe” notebook.

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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”