It occurred to me over the past week that if you were to get inside my Evernote, you would instantly learn so much about me.

In some ways, the structures of our individual “clouds” say a lot more about us than any diary could. E.g., “this is how I curate”, “this is what matters to me”, “this is my weakness – the stuff I need a cloud to help me remember”.

But this is also what makes Evernote so great. They never really tell you how to use it. It’s up to you. In this way, your Notebooks become insanely personal. And if you come up with something neat, maybe you’ll feature on the Evernote Tumblr.

Well, here’s a glimpse of mine (click to enlarge):

• Blog Ideas: Did I think of something cool on the subway? I note it on my iTouch Evernote app and sync as soon as I get a network connection.
• Clinical Notes: No patient information here. Just interesting clinical insights (right now, mostly useful tips for talking to patients).
• Ethics: I love Virtual Mentor, the AMA’s SUPERB medical ethics journal. I work through the cases in my spare time and save them as notes. Tagging is invaluable here. For example, if I need notes on “abortion”, there you go. Also great for keeping notes on Medical Law.
• Fiction: Bits and pieces of stories.
• Press: The Evernote extension for Chrome and Firefox makes clipping my blog press easy-peasy. Never forget any URLs again!
• Random: A little bit of everything – mostly my favourites from Ask Metafilter and images from websites.
• Research: It started out as a repository for terms I didn’t understand in journal articles like “Principal Components Analysis”. Now I’m beginning to really like Evernote’s PDF capabilities – especially being able to embed and flip through whole articles inside a note – so I will be taking it out for a test drive as a Systematic Revew tool.
• US Health Reform 2009: Possibly my most useful notebook EVER! I started collecting articles on the Health Reform debate in September 2009 by bookmarks, but it just didn’t cut it. Then I got Evernote and spent a few days going back through all the links I shared on Twitter re: HR and this baby was born! So, now, say I want to get all my saved articles on Medicare – I just click the “Medicare” tag. Of course, this notebook is quite interesting in earlier versions of Evernote as the Time Band shows when I added each note – it’s like seeing HR happen right before your eyes – unfortunately, the latest release seems to have scrapped that feature.

A question for you: Evernote and personal health info

One thing I noticed from my own notebooks was the conspicuous lack of personal health information. I have, of course, read all about the dangers of doctors storing any patient information in Evernote (HIPAA nightmare…), but I wonder whether patients themselves go ahead and keep records in Evernote?

Let me know if you’ve seen this!

And now I want to ask you: what’s in your Evernote and why? And, secondly, if you’re a patient, do you/would you store personal health information on it?

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For further reading on Evernote in medicine and health, check out DrV’s post at 33charts: 8 Ways Physicians Can Use Evernote

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