Jot It Down Using Note-Taking Tools

Keep your mind in one place! Steno pads. Spiral notebooks. Legal pads. The back of an envelope. A cocktail napkin. Receipts. The corner of a newspaper. If you're like most entrepreneurs, you've got ideas striking you every hour of the day and night, and you grab the nearest writing implement and snippet of paper to scrawl a few words on. But how often do those pieces of paper make it into something more permanent? With today's variety of note-taking and idea-gathering software, there's no excuse for stealing your kids' crayons anymore. Take a look at these multimedia opportunities for storing your thoughts, ideas, photos, blog posts, and more... and best yet, they're all free! Eve ote Collect, sort, tag, and annotate a variety of notes and other information. Log in online or access it via your iPhone. Store your web clips, text clips, videos, audios, and more in a single file. You can even snap a photo with your mobile phone and save it. Oh yeah, you can share it with others! Find out more at Eve ote.com OneNote This is Microsoft's version of a note book that lets you capture text, images, video, and audio notes and take and edit notes with other people in other locations. View and edit your notes from virtually any computer with an Internet connection or your Windows phone. Available with Microsoft Office. Find out more here. Springnote This is a free, online notebook based on wiki. You can create pages, keep them in your Personal Notebook or create a Group Notebook to share with friends. Store up to 2GB online. Add photos, comments, and more. Springnote for the iPhone is also available. Find out more at Springnote.com Tumblr If you're the visual type, you might want to take a look at this note book. Billed as “the easiest way to blog,” it's a fun way to create your own virtual bulletin board with pictures, photos, quotes, audio, video, and more. You can set your privacy level and collaborators, creating a bulletin board just for yourself, or one to share with a team or the public. There's also a free iPhone app. Find out more at Tumblr.com Virtual Yellow Stickies Depending on what browser you are using, you may already have virtual yellow stickies available to you. If not, simply Google the words "virtual sticky notes and you will find many great free tools. One of my favorites before I switched to IE8 was Stickies by Zoh Software. You can read more about them here on my Internet Mastery Blog. I use yellow stickies on one of my monitors to store often used html code snippets. After perusing these sites, you've probably come up with a dozen or more ideas that you quickly jotted down on a scrap of paper somewhere. Don't waste them – choose a note-taking solution and get your thoughts and goals down safely and permanently. You can't act on your ideas if you don't remember where you put those notes!