Inspired by airy surroundings and collaborative atmosphere, Evernoters happily mix work with life and share their discoveries about using Evernote. In this series, we’ll spotlight employees and the clever and creative ways they use the product! Get some inspiration from Evernote insiders.
Monica Chua loves whiteboards. She relies on them to illustrate even her everyday speech, because to her, communications and visuals are inextricably linked. As a director of product marketing for Evernote, she often has a difficult time explaining to people on the outside what product marketing is. “People don’t understand it,” she laughs. “They don’t know the difference between product management and product marketing. So I….” she trails off and instead reaches for a dry erase marker that’s always within her reach. On the whiteboard, she sketches out the customer’s journey from discovering the product to buying and using it.
Monica Chua, Director of Product Marketing
“I’m a very visual person, and to break down concepts or to create a vision for a marketing plan or project strategy, I need to sketch it on a whiteboard or put it on paper,” she says. “So using Evernote to take pictures of all my drawings and handwritten notes is my favorite thing.”
Monica is pragmatic about her “sketchy” communication style. She sees illustrations as an extension of her own speech that’s automatically ready for collaboration and discussion. Ideas can move out of the meeting room and out into the world effortlessly. “Drawing and sending optimized photos is the best way for me to help others understand what we’re doing,” she said. “I put all my drawings in shared notebooks so others can see what we’re talking about and get a visual understanding of it, even if they didn’t hear our discussion.”
Monica has tapped into one of the most useful business applications in Evernote. “Others can annotate it,” she says. “Everyone can see the annotations, and all the other projects that are related to it are in the same notebook—that notebook becomes the one source of truth.”
Monica’s job requires a lot of research, and she has to be able to keep it accessible. She’s especially enthusiastic about using Evernote to help with research online. “If there’s an article on a market segment I’m trying to understand, I save it to Evernote with Web Clipper.” The material you clip stays in Evernote, even if the website comes down, so you always have a record of what was once there. That’s really useful.”
Monica’s tips:
- Use Command+J on a Mac. That command is a quick switcher that lets you search anything really quickly.
- Let the camera do the work. Evernote takes photos without you having to push a button. Just point the Evernote camera at the document you want to photograph, and Evernote will automatically detect it and capture the image. It will then convert it into a usable document, and you don’t have to do a thing.
- Trust Search. If you’re not an organizer, just let search do the work. It’s easier than trying to force everything into traditional files. I used to think I had to organize everything, but if I let go of that and just trust search, I’ll be able to find it faster without spending time on organization. I make sure my notes are tagged by topic, or I’ll put a keyword in there that I know will come up. I still use notebooks when I work with a group because others might not understand or know the search term, but when I’m just working for myself, I don’t even bother with trying to organize it. It’s so liberating.
