• Name: Jeanine Hays
• Profession: Creative Director & Founder
• Company: AphroChic
• Location: Philadelphia, PA

Did you know that May is National Home Improvement month? It’s a great time to think about ways to spruce up your home and garden, so we thought we’d ask an expert to share some tips for ways that Evernote helps her keep track of inspiration and organize projects.

Bio

Jeanine Hays is the Creative Director & Founder of AphroChic, a home decor and design brand that includes a popular blog and shop that sells textiles and home accessories. A policy attorney, Jeanine founded AphroChic three years ago as an interior design blog, and quickly expanded into a business that allowed her to create designs of her own. Jeanine has a weekly feature on color and textiles on HGTV’s interior design blog, Design Happens. She has also participated as an online guest judge for the 2010 season of HGTV’s Design Star, and is a featured blogger for Houzz. After being introduced to Evernote by a home owner she was working with, Jeanine became hooked on using the tool for everything from planning her travels to coordinating with her team, and working on her book.

Jeanine’s Stylish Tips for Home Projects

Above: capture inspiration on the Web, using the Evernote Web Clipper. Select tags and notebooks. All of your web clips automatically sync across all of your devices.

I am a huge fan of Evernote. As a textile designer, blogger, and soon-to-be author it’s extremely important for me to be as organized as possible, and Evernote helps me to stay organized at all times. Part of my job is focused on styling. I’ve been styling several interiors for our home decor book, and use Evernote to stay on top of the numerous projects that have to be done for each interior. Evernote is fantastic for:

1. Keeping track of a list of different projects. Our team spent time shooting and styling interiors in Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. I created a separate notebook for each interior, and then collected a list of items I wanted to bring into each room in the space. Whether a pillow, a new piece of lighting, or flowers, it was all neatly collected in my Evernote notebook.
2. Evernote is also great way to communicate with others who are involved in your home decor project. For me, it was my styling team. I needed to easily be able to send them the items I was thinking of using in a particular interior. It can be just as handy when sending ideas for your next renovation project to your significant other, designer, and even your contractor. [Evernote Tip: share notes via email or add them to a Shared Notebook, then invite individuals to view what you've shared.]
3. The sync function is also integral to any interior project you’re working on. You can keep track of ideas on your computer, and voila, the project you’re working on is ready and synced on your iPhone. This is fantastic when you’re on a purchasing trip, and need to access your notes quickly. [Learn how Sync works]
4. The great thing about Evernote for interiors projects is that you can keep absolutely everything on file — measurements, store and contact information, vendor names, and even color palettes. It can all be kept and organized to help you achieve your project goals easily. [Learn how to capture multiple types of media in a single note]

Just getting started with Evernote? Check out our Getting Started Guide.

Want more inspiration for ways you can use Evernote for home decorating? Check out how home and design blogger Erin Souder uses Evernote for decorating her home.

Do you have tips to share for ways you’re using Evernote for styling and sprucing up your home? Share them in the comments!

I tend to attack at least a few recipes a week that require step-by-step instructions and a few ingredients I probably don’t have at home. For a weeknight dinner, I might do something as simple as pan searing a piece of fish and roasting a few vegetables on the side. Weeknights, particularly when I’m having friends over for dinner, I’ll put together an actual menu: an appetizer, main, side dish, and dessert. This requires some additional research and planning. I have Evernote installed on my work computer (a Mac), my second home computer (also a Mac), my Android phone and my iPad, so no matter where I am — at work, on the couch, in the kitchen, at the grocery store, or on the train — I have access to my recipes, grocery lists and notes.

Here is how I go about planning out and cooking a delicious meal:

• Ongoing capture of recipes and recipe inspiration.
  I feverishly clip from the web using the Evernote browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. I clip recipes from my favorite food blogs (like 101cookbooks, The Year in Food, A Sweet Spoonful, Dula Notes, shutterbean, Smitten Kitchen, Joy the Baker, Not Without Salt and Sprouted Kitchen) as well as resource and magazine sites like Epicurious.com, Bon Appetit and Saveur. I like to grab the recipe along with an image or two. If the accompanying post is something I might want to remember, I clip that as well. I’m not super organized about my recipes. I tag them as ‘recipes,’ ‘main,’ ‘dessert’ or my favorite: ‘breakfast.’

See a collection of my favorite breakfast recipes from my food and music site, Turntable Kitchen, in my Shared Notebook. >>> Turntable Kitchen Breakfast Recipes

• Saving photos of handwritten and printed recipes.
  The web is a wealth of information when it comes to recipes, but I love a good old fashioned cookbook or magazine. I’ll often snap a photo of a recipe from a cookbook and save it in Evernote to remind myself to make it later. My mom is a fabulous cook, but she rarely writes down her recipes, so when I get her to write something down — on a piece of scrap paper — I now take a photo of it to search for it later. Evernote can search for text inside of an image so Mom’s Beet Salad doesn’t get lost in my kitchen drawers.

• Narrowing down the recipe search.
  Search is one of Evernote’s most powerful features. Within seconds, I can narrow down hundreds of recipes into a handful. I can compare them visually to figure out which one I want to go with. A search for ‘drinks’ and/or ‘party’ brings up all of the recipes tagged as such. A search for ‘chicken’ finds every recipe with chicken as an ingredient. If I search for ‘Mom,’ I’ll find the recipes my mom has shared with me. From there, I might look in my pantry and decide I really want to use some dried beans I recently purchased. I can search for beans and see all of the recipes containing the word ‘beans.’ Sometimes I’m drawn to a recipe by name, sometimes, by image.

• Choosing the recipe, preparing the grocery list.
  Once I’ve decided on what I’m making, I’ll create a new note titled, “Grocery list.’ I often delete my grocery lists after I’m done with them. If I’m at my desk, I’ll create a checklist, but if I’m on the train, I’ll just jot down the items I remember into my phone. When I’m at the store — even if it’s a last minute pit stop — I always have the grocery list and the full recipe with me.
• The real fun: cooking.
  Back home, I bring my iPad into the kitchen, pull up the recipe in Evernote and start cooking!
• Documenting the experience.
  When I’ve made something, I like to note whether it was tasty, and if I’d make it again. If a recipe is a complete fail, I delete it from my Evernote. But if it could be made better, I make a note of it for the future.

There you have it: planning and cooking a meal with Evernote.

Do you have any tips for organizing recipes, planning and cooking a meal with Evernote? We’d love to hear them in the comments.

Bio

Ryan Kessler is a student from Southern California who will be starting college in the Fall. Evernote helped Ryan get organized his senior year of high school and raise his GPA from a 2.9 to a 4.4 (if you’re unfamiliar with these numbers, that’s really great!). Read on to find out how he did it.

I use Evernote, Everywhere:

• Android (phone and Tablet)
• Windows
• Web Clipper (Chrome)

I love…

• The Droidscan app for scanning all of my docs using my phone
• Nozbe for giving calendar context to my Evernote notes
• tarpipe for publishing content to my various social streams with one single action

I use Evernote for…

My senior year of high school, I took 5 high school courses, 4 college classes and worked part-time, so I needed to find a tool that would help me stay organized and focused on whatever task I needed to complete. Evernote completely changed my workflow.

1. Evernote for staying focused

A big part of being a high school student is being able to switch modes extremely quickly. Within a few hours, you have to go from physics to history. Evernote lets me do this seamlessly.

I have a Notebook Stack of notebooks for various activities, including school and work. When I’m at work, I open my Work Notebook Stack and know that I won’t have any distractions because I wouldn’t see all of my extra-curricular stuff mixed into work stuff. [An introduction to Notebook Stacks]

2. Evernote for getting organized

My freshman and sophomore year, I was very disorganized. The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t managing my time well, it was that I couldn’t find the things I wanted when I needed them. I used to spend hours just sorting through my schoolwork to find one assignment. Once I started using Evernote, life became a lot more organized:

• I got into a routine of sorting everything into Evernote as soon as I got it so I could instantly access it when I needed it. I attribute my GPA boost largely to my new-found ability to find everything quickly, from any device I was working on.
• Once I get stuff in Evernote, I organize it. I have a tagging system to separate out tasks and projects.
• I scan paper documents using Droidscan, which is a fantastic app I found in the Evernote Trunk.
• I draft reports right in Evernote, where my research is close at hand.

3. Evernote for lightening my load and connecting all of my devices

I started using Evernote so much, I stopped thinking about it. I even started scanning textbook sections I needed that day in class so I’d have them on my phone. It got to the point where I would go to school with only my journal and my phone.

A lot of students bring their laptops to class because they think they need to carry around their files. With Evernote, I never had to lug around my laptop. Our school would rent out laptops from the library, so if I needed to print anything, I’d just stick it into Evernote in the morning, pop by the library at the end of the day, pull up Evernote on the Web and use the school printer. I never think of having a thumb drive anymore.

With Evernote, I can see everything I have to do, want to do, and already done. I never have to think ‘Oh, shoot, I left something in my locker!’ Maybe I forgot my phone in my locker, but because everything in Evernote syncs across every device I own (not to mention the Web), I know it’s still there and I could access it from my desktop at home, the school laptop in the library, or my tablet.

4. Evernote for group projects and class discussions

When you’re working with a group, you tend to get a lot of information passed back and forth via email. I started using Evernote to keep track of all of my group projects by giving group members my Evernote email. Everything related to the project would get sent to my Evernote account, where I could organize it accordingly and stay on top of the latest versions and conversations. [Emailing to Evernote]

We’d often have class discussions via a thread on a forum that my school subscribes to. Threads would get long and tedious and require you to login to keep track of the conversation. I would just clip it to my Evernote account and pull it up whenever I needed it.

5. Evernote for crunch time

Creating a study guide before a big test was so easy with Evernote. I would compile all of my notes from a certain time period and put them into a separate notebook. From there, I could reference only the materials I needed to study.

6. Evernote for learning a foreign language

I love Evernote’s Audio Note function to help me remember stuff, but it’s also a killer way to help you learn a language. I use audio notes to record myself pronouncing words, then play back the recording to see if my pronunciation matched my teacher’s pronunciation. When you’re learning a language, you need some way of hearing yourself to perfect your accent.

7. Evernote for building my future

I’m starting college in the Fall and will be studying entrepreneurship and design. I attended the Evernote Trunk Conference and saw Kyle Koch’s presentation about using Evernote for industrial design and was blown away. Evernote is crazy powerful for design and I’m excited to see how it fits into my ongoing studies and professional career. [Read Kyle Koch's story]

User Tip: Note Links for Creating a Study Guide in a Single Note

Note Links are an awesome way to associate two notes incredibly quickly. I use Note Links to create a study guide in a single note. I often snap a photo of the whiteboard in class and then take notes as well. With Note Links, I can link my notes to the whiteboard image, giving additional context. [Learn how to link your notes]

Join the discussion about Evernote for Schools on our forum. Learn from educators and share your own experiences, best practices and tips.