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The medical device company iHealth is one of a few that’s bringing ease of measurement and data collection to smartphone users. iHealth, an Evernote partner, makes wireless blood pressure monitors, scales, and fitness tracking devices. The company is at the very interesting intersection between what we think of as fitness and medicine, and its president, Adam Lin, has a unique perspective on the future of body monitoring and self-improvement.

Lin is my guest on this episode of Evernote Talks. Check it out to learn about the current state of the art in body monitoring, and where it’s going in the future, too. (iHealth products are available in the Evernote Trunk and elsewhere.)

Want more? See the previous episode of Evernote Talks, with Guy Kawasaki.

Learn more about EverClip in the Evernote Trunk!

Giveaway: Follow us on Twitter, then send a tweet including the hashtags #Evernote and #EverClip for a chance to win 1 of 6 free EverClip codes. We’ll randomly choose winners on May 20, 2013.

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Are you a developer interested in joining the more than 20,000 developers worldwide who are building with Evernote? Visit dev.evernote.com to get more information and get started!

Email is hard to search, and a lot of times, isn’t a great place to get actual work done. That’s where Evernote comes in. If you already forward a lot of emails from your Gmail account to Evernote,  you’ll find Powerbot for Gmail to be a smart work tool.  It lets you add tags and comments to your emails, pull in links to notes or notebooks from Evernote to any outgoing email, and do it all right inside the Gmail interface.

Get Powerbot for Gmail from the Evernote Trunk.

Saving emails to Evernote

Powerbot makes your emails more useful to you once they’re in your Evernote account. After you install Powerbot, a “Send to Evernote” button will appear next to Gmail’s Reply option. Click on the button to bring up the Powerbot interface, where you can choose your destination notebook, tags, and comments. If the email is part of a threaded conversation, you can save the entire thread to your Evernote account. Any attachments will be included if you choose.

Attaching notes to email

When you’re in your Gmail account writing an email, you’ll see buttons right inside the email window that allow you to add notes and notebooks from your Evernote account. Here are few ways to incorporate Powerbot into your workflow:

If you…

• are emailing about a meeting, you can insert a link to your Evernote note with details about what you need to discuss.
• need to share a whole notebook, such as your full project specs and designs, you can insert a link to that notebook right in your email text.
• want to save all sent emails in Evernote to stay organized? Open the Powerbot interface to choose the destination notebook, and add tags and comments.

Get a free year with Powerbot

Leave a comment about how you would use Powerbot for work or life, including the hashtag #Powerbot. We’ll randomly choose 3 people to receive a code for 1 year of Powerbot for Gmail, a value of $14.99. This giveaway ends May 15, 2013.

Are you a developer interested in joining the more than 20,000 developers worldwide who are building with Evernote? Visit dev.evernote.com to get more information and get started!

If you or someone in a key role were to take a sick day or a vacation, would someone else be ready to pick up the slack? Would a new hire be able to learn a specific task without you sitting next to them and walking them through it? Or what if you just want to save yourself the headache of remembering a lengthy process the next time you need to get it done?

Documenting important tasks that keep your business moving forward is a great practice for professionals, whether you work on a team or are trying to be a more productive individual. Keeping notes about your workflow makes it a lot easier to remember how to do things, share your tasks with others, and make sure that everyone understands what needs to be done and exactly how to do it. It also makes things a lot easier when the unexpected occurs – when your processes are written down, someone else can easily fill-in.

Here are a few ways I use Evernote, Skitch, and Clarify to help me document different kinds of workflows:

Documenting Simple Procedures

Evernote is a great place to keep non-screen-based workflows written down, such as procedures for follow-up phone calls to clients, or steps on the computer that don’t need detailed explanation, like sending an email. For these types of workflows, I use the checkbox and numbered list features to outline specific steps, then add text to further explain items, if needed.

Documenting Complicated Workflows

For any workflow where someone needs to complete detailed actions on a computer, pictures are always better than words. The idea behind documenting your processes and workflow is to save time; using a combination of text and images can help minimize confusion so that others are able to complete the correct steps quickly and efficiently. There are two ways I’d recommend documenting this type of workflow:

Skitch + Evernote

Skitch lets you grab a screenshot, annotate it, and send it directly to Evernote for a simple way to document, store, and share simple screen-based processes. It’s often hard to remember exactly what every screen in every application does or what every icon means. Instead of struggling to figure it out each time, you can take a screenshot and use Skitch to highlight all the details you need. And, if you store it in Evernote, all your notes on the process will be available to you or a teammate with a simple search. The combination of Skitch + Evernote is great for documenting a single screen or a single step in detail.

Clarify + Evernote

Clarify (available in the Evernote Trunk) is a great tool for documenting multi-step workflows on your computer. With Clarify, you can take multiple screenshots, annotate each one, organize them into a series of steps, and add additional text to further explain each step. Once you’ve created the entire workflow document, you can save it directly to your Evernote account for collaboration or sharing. A good example of when you might want to use Clarify is in explaining how to send out an email newsletter, which usually involves a number of critical steps.

Once you’ve documented your processes you can then store them in a Shared Notebook, then set view, modify and share permissions for each person your share the notebook with.

Or, if you’re using Evernote Business, add them to a notebook in your Business Library so that anyone you work with can access them when needed. In my business, I’ve created notes for using our CRM tool, accounting software, and even how to post an item to our blog at www.CustomLivingSolutions.com - each of these processes has many steps and would be hard to explain with just words!

Don’t forget to check out my new book, Evernote @ Work! It’s available in the Trunk, and it’s loaded with ways you can use Evernote in your daily work to make things easier, more effective, more collaborative, and more productive for you and your company.

Do you use Evernote as part of your daily workflow? Tell us about it in the comments!

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From capturing photos of job sites under construction to saving scans of paper documents to discovering the shared knowledge of his entire team, Evernote Business lets him run almost every aspect of his company in the office and on the go. Watch now to see how RCKa uses Evernote Business, and learn what Evernote Business can do for your company.

Getting ready for baby with Evernote

Planning for the arrival of a new baby is exhilarating, stressful, and overwhelming…all at the same time. There are registries to create, nurseries to decorate, pediatricians to select, books to read, and hospital bags to pack. If you’re getting ready for the arrival of a little one here are some ways Evernote can help.

1. Create a ‘Baby’ notebook and share it with your spouse, partner, or supportive family member/friend. Save everything baby-related to this notebook so you have a comprehensive place of reference that you can access from any device or computer and that both of you can update.

2. Keep track of advice and recommendations. You’re going to get a lot of advice from all sorts of people about everything from how best to raise your baby to what laundry detergent you should use. When you receive advice you think might come in handy, drop it into a note. Remember: you can capture notes when you’re at your desktop, as well as with your mobile phone or tablet.

3. Start creating your registry. Download the Evernote Web Clipper and start clipping baby products you like, reviews for strollers and car seats, etc. There are lots of great resources out there; clip blog posts such as this and this that can help you figure out what items you should register for. Once you’re ready to register, remember that all of your Web Clips will include the source URL so can immediately add products to your registry (I used MyRegistry.com, which allowed me to add products from multiple websites into one location).

4. Record memorable milestones. When was the first time you felt the baby kick or had a contraction? Use Evernote to record milestones throughout your pregnancy and keep this habit going after the baby is born.

5. Document your doctor’s appointments. Come prepared for every doctor’s appointment. Create a list of questions you’d like to ask your doctor in Evernote so you don’t forget them when you’re on the spot. Jot down your doctor’s tips and advice, as well as any important updates related to your progress.

6. Capture inspiration for your nursery. Snap photos of decorations and products in-store and use the Web Clipper to capture ideas for furniture, DIY projects and storage solutions. You can visually scan through all of your nursery decorating ideas if you create a tag for your nursery inspiration and search for all notes containing that tag.

7. Save important documents. You’ll be inundated with documents throughout your pregnancy — from doctor’s bills to sonograms, you’ll want to scan everything to your Evernote account so you don’t have to find yourself searching for your insurance information or important phone numbers in scattered corners around your house, your bag, and in your nightstand.

8. Don’t forget to thank your support system. Create a checklist of people to thank for baby shower gifts, cards, and support. You’ll be busy, but Evernote can help you make sure you don’t forget about the people who matter.

9. Pack your hospital bag. Create a checklist for everything you’ll need for your hospital bag. Reference it when you’re out shopping and check off items as you purchase them (your updates will sync to Evernote everywhere you have it installed). Need to double check you have everything before you rush out the door? Pull up your list on your phone.

10. Keep frequently-referenced information handy. Want to know what fish you can and shouldn’t eat while you’re pregnant? Save frequently-referenced information in Evernote and find it by doing a quick keyword search. I used American Pregnancy Association’s breakdown of mercury levels in fish to remind myself what I should avoid at restaurants.

11. Track your eating habits. Download Evernote Food to your iPhone, Android, and/or iPad and use it to keep track of what you’re eating throughout your pregnancy. Adjust your habits accordingly if you feel that you’re not eating enough nutritious foods.

12. Prepare yourself for the big day. Forward your hospital registration information from your inbox to your Evernote account using your Evernote email, create a note with important contact phone numbers, insurance information and your pediatrician, and save your birth plan in Evernote.

Are you expecting? How are you using Evernote to help you get ready? We’d love to hear in the comments! Also, be sure to follow Parenting Ambassador Carley Knobloch for more tips about ways to use Evernote for Parenting.

Learn more about CloudMagic in the Evernote Trunk!

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Bio

Abhishek Baxi is a personal technology columnist for Hindustan Times and liveMint, a social media enthusiast and a podcaster. He is also a contributing author on Techie-Buzz.

I use Evernote, Everywhere:

• Windows Desktop
• Windows Phone

I Used Evernote to Plan My Wedding

I’ve been a user of Evernote for Windows Desktop since 2009 and started using it on Windows Phone as soon as it became available. I regularly use Evernote for work and used it extensively to plan my wedding. Evernote helped to ensure everything went smoothly, and that our special day was filled with happy relatives and cherished memories.

I got engaged in July 2011, but I started to rely heavily on Evernote to keep my wedding plans on track in September, when we set our wedding date, and the pressure of organizing everything suddenly came to the fore. I started by creating a separate ‘Wedding’ notebook in my Evernote account, to help me keep track of all the details, including bookings, invitee lists, wedding attire, family giveaways, caterers and even the finances. Indian weddings can be very elaborate; Evernote helped me keep track of every detail. Throughout the planning process, I often used Evernote on the go. If I waited until I got home to capture my notes, I would have undoubtedly missed something important.

Wedding planning means visiting the most crowded markets, where you get the most variety and the best rates. I went to Chandni Chowk in Delhi to buy many things for my wedding, and with the massive variety, options, prices, etc. it was not possible to remember everything. I took notes and photos on the spot, which helped me make decisions later.

10 Tips for Planning an Indian Wedding with Evernote

1. Create a separate ‘Wedding’ notebook, then create a note for each item that needs to be tracked, like accounts, catering, and guest lists.
2. Scan or snap a photo of vendors’ business cards, so you never have to worry about losing important contact information. Evernote’s ability to search for text inside images makes them easy to find anytime.
3. Snap photos of ideas and inspiration that you come across while shopping. With Evernote, you can keep them all in one place, and share them with your fiancée later.
4. Scan or snap a photo of receipts as soon as you make a wedding-related purchase. I was the sole person organizing my wedding and even on the wedding day, I had to deal with vendors. I obviously didn’t want to carry every receipt from every vendor, so having pictures of them in my Evernote account was invaluable. On the day of the wedding, I was able to confirm the balances that remained to be paid and answer any vendor questions (like who had been paid in part or in full) by simply searching through my account.
5. Forward wedding-related text messages from friends and family to your Evernote email account, so that you can refer back to them everywhere you have Evernote. Capturing these special moments in Evernote means that I can look back at them years later.
6. Tag all of the notes in your ‘Wedding’ notebook to make them easier to search and browse.
7. Use notes to remember your guests’ food and dining preferences and other details. These are helpful for instructing vendors in advance and on the day of your wedding, so everything goes smoothly.
8. Use the Evernote Web Clipper to plan your honeymoon. Clip articles, hotel and restaurant information, and more. I used the Web Clipper extensively while planning my honeymoon with my wife. It’s a great tool for collecting a lot of ideas in one place.
9. Create a Shared Notebook for the tasks that need to be coordinated with others, then share it with friends so that they can help make your wedding a great day.
10. Manage your travel bookings and travel-related expenses in Evernote.

Have you used Evernote to plan a wedding? Tell us how in the comments.