As digital data has grown over the years and our dependency on gadgets has risen, there came a need for something more than the concept of simply storing files in different folders in the cloud. The concept of note-taking thus evolved and has made steady progress over the last 4-5 years. I had Evernote installed in my phablet since March 2014 but never really used it until 2016.

When I started using it bit by bit for small amounts of information, I started realizing the significance of it. Today in my Evernote Premium account I have 649 notes in 14 notebooks with 80 tags categorizing each of them. The major driving factor for myself taking up the Evernote Premium membership even after having the OneDrive with Office 365 subscription was fine-tuning my daily life and re-organizing my digital life in the best possible fashion.

Taking quick notes the moment they need to be taken or jotting down quick ideas is now a breeze, more so with the Evernote widgets that allow one-tap access in smartphones. Going paperless is now easier than ever, with Evernote's smart camera - it is really good at scanning documents and provides different modes to save it as Photo, Document (my favorite), Color Document, Post-it Note or a Business Card.

Evernote has the feature to scan text in PDF and Scanned documents or Image files. This is extremely useful for me. I have saved a lot of my E-Books and documents in Evernote just for the fact that they are much more useful to me since I can search all the documents at once in Evernote instead of individually searching them or searching them via file names. It's like I am searching all the information that I have read in my life together at once, this feature is definitely worth the price.

On the left you can see my tag tree, under each bold tag, I have multiple child tags. The tags concept is a very handy and powerful tool for organizing all the notes. Most of my notes go to my notebook called "Personal", the ones I am yet to organize go to ".Inbox" (note the dot at the front - it stays at the top this way since special characters are given priority in Evernote while sorting). And I have a notebook for my E-Books. So the notebooks are not my main priority while organizing my stuffs, the tags make my stuffs organized.

Going paperless has been of priority for me over the last few months, so all bills and receipts are now online. The ones that are not but deserves to be saved end up in front of the Evernote smart camera. This has greatly reduced the clutter at my home and office. More than that, finding out information faster is much easier than before from the thousands of receipts accumulated over the months.

Evernote is nicely integrated with IFTTT also. The best part is I also keep backup of my smartphone using the IFTTT recipes. All my text messages are saved to a "Texts" notebook - just in case if I need to revisit or search them later after few years. All my blog articles are also automatically saved in Evernote in a notebook called "Insight Crunch" as I publish. All my iTunes and Amazon receipts are also automatically saved to the notebook "Bills and Checks". Any screenshots I take in my smartphone are also saved in Evernote in a separate notebook.

Overall, note-taking is going to shape the future of the personal cloud over the years to come. How do you keep your stuffs organized?