Learn how to create a reminder in Evernote. Reminders are great for a variety of tasks - from business meetings to grocery lists. Watch this short tutorial v. Sign up for FollowUpThen. FollowUpThen is free email reminder service that can send you all types. Open a note and click the reminder button (bell with a plus sign) at the bottom of the note. Select a date and time, and the reminder will automatically be saved. Older version of Evernote for Mac and Evernote for Windows. Open a note and click the options button (three dots). Click Reminder (Windows) or Add Reminder (Mac), then click Add a Date.
- Add Reminder To Evernote Email
- Evernote Notifications
- Evernote Add A Reminder To A Note
- What Is Evernote
- Evernote Calendar
Evernote recurring reminders are on the way, according to this interview with Evernote CEO, Chris Philbin.
In the meantime, here’s how you can set up recurring reminders in the next few minutes. It’s a solution that continues to work very well for me. The usual disclaimer that your mileage may vary applies, of course.
Evernote is just one of the tools that I use to run my business every day. I now have a (free) preferred tool for recurring reminders.For more details on that, check out this new post.
Evernote Recurring Reminders Hack
FIRST: You’ve got to have a system for using Evernote that borrows from something like David Allen’s GTD. (Although you might know I’m not a huge fan of the bells and whistles and prefer a more simplistic approach.)
Simply put, the system you’ll need to have in place is one that uses a single Evernote notebook as your default dumping ground. Let’s call it @INBOX (the @ symbol means it will stick to the top of your favorites list in your Evernote sidebar.)
Nothing should ever remain in your @INBOX once you’ve reviewed it. Where you put it is up to you, but don’t leave it in your default notebook. That’s for processing only.
You can set this up under General Preferences:
SECOND: You need to regularly review your @INBOX – once a day or once every two days is good – and assign due dates to notes that need acting upon.
Dumping everything into your @INBOX and adding reminder dates later frees you up from having to assign a date when you’re creating notes on the fly, from your phone, for example.
THIRD: Create an account over at IFTTT and link your Evernote account.
FOURTH: Use this recipe that I’ve created for you to create a new note at a particular day and time:
Customize it as you see fit (day of the week, time, content of the note)
LAST STEP: When you’re doing your daily review of your Evernote @INBOX, you can assign a date (and thus create a reminder) to this note, and move it out of your @INBOX. Delete it or mark it as done when you’ve finished.
That’s it.
(There are other ways of doing this, including sending your Evernote account an email on a repeating basis, using any of the tools that take care of that kind of thing. But this one works for me.)
If you’re not yet an Evernote user, or you ARE an Evernote user but you’ve never really got to grips with it, I recommend Evernote Essentials by Brett Kelly as an excellent starting point.
Let’s face it, Evernote is simply… awesome!
You can write notes, save documents, archive important files, share all of that goodness with other people and this is just scratching the surface. You can use it to create your next multi-million dollar product for your business, or to make a groceries list for that Sunday barbeque. Evernote gives you a blank canvas and lets you create your own masterpiece, as simple, or as complicated, as you want to make it.
Evernote even introduced a couple of months ago a new feature that makes the software even more valuable – reminders. You can set up a separate reminder for each and every note to make sure you never miss a meeting, or a deadline.
But…
If you need to set up a recurring reminder, you are out of luck. If you have an event that occurs in regular intervals, say a monthly meeting with your team on the 1st of every month, Evernote reminders won’t work for you (unless you want to set up one every single month for the next month, which defeats the whole purpose). For some reason, or another, the Evernote headquarters has decided against recurring reminders, so if you want to use such a feature, you need to go outside Evernote.
Until now.
Although recurring reminders don’t come standard with Evernote, there is a pretty easy (and free) workaround that you can set up in just a couple of minutes and 3 simple steps.
STEP 1 – Sign up for FollowUpThen
Add Reminder To Evernote Email
FollowUpThen is free email reminder service that can send you all types of reminders at a specific date and time and it works flawlessly with Evernote.
Before you open an account with them, you first need to figure out what email you are using with Evernote. You need the same email to sign up with FollowUpThen (FUT), or the system won’t work. In most cases, this is the email that you use to sign into your Evernote account. If you are using a username for that purpose, here is what to do to get the email that is associated with your Evernote account. Go to Evernote.com and sign in like you normally would. Click on your name on the top right corner and select Account Settings. Halfway down the page you can see what email Evernote has for your account.
Quick note: you need your email address that is associated with your Evernote account, NOT the one that Evernote gives you that ends with @evernote.com.
Now, head over to FollowUpThen and use the same email address as Evernote to sign up for a free account.
Simply enter your email address and click on Get Started.
Step 2 – Verify and Set Time Zone
FollowUpThen will ask you to verify your email address. Head over to your inbox and look for an email from them containing a verification link. Once you click it, your will end up back on their website.
In the window that opens up, enter your name and the password you want to use for your new account (here is how to create a secure password). This is pretty standard, so you should not have any issues.
Make sure you select the correct time zone you are in. FUT relies heavily on this information, so don’t skip over it.
Once you have entered all the information slick on Save and your new account should be all set.
Step 3 – Set up your (recurring) reminders
Evernote Notifications
Go into Evernote and navigate to a note you want to set up a reminder for.
Right-click on the note and select Share > Send by email (Windows), or Send > Email note (Mac). If you are using the online application, open the note and click on the Share button on the top right of the note itself and click on Email.
In the new window that pops up is where the magic happens, specifically in the TO field.
FollowUpThen will email you a reminder (along with your note) depending on what email address you enter in the TO field.
For example, if you enter monday3pm@followupthen.com you’ll get a reminder on Monday at 3 PM (in your time zone). If you send the note to march30th@followupthen.com, you’ll get a reminder on March 30th.
Evernote Add A Reminder To A Note
Nothing special so far, Evernote can do that on its own, right? Not quite. Here is where it gets interesting:
If you send an email to everywed@followupthen.com you’ll get a recurring reminder every Wednesday. Magic!
You can do daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, at a specific time of the day… there is almost no limit to what you can do. You just need to enter the correct email address in the TO field. For a very comprehensive list of emails and examples check out this page.
If you want to set a reminder for Mom’s bday, which is on March 30th, all you need to do is send your note to everymarch30th@followupthen.com and on the correct date, every year, you’ll get a reminder email along with your Evernote note. Recurring reminder problem, solved!
Note on security: FUT never actually sees the content of your emails, so all your data is completely secure and private. Their system is fully automated and the email addresses are only used as means for the system to know when to dispatch your reminders. Nobody can actually open those emails and access your data.
To sum it all up, in the TO field, enter the correct address depending on when you want your reminder to show up in your inbox. Enter a subject for your email. The body of email is completely optional and typically not necessary. When you are all set, click on Send and you are all done.
On the specified date and time (based on the email in the TO field), FUT will send you a reminder email, along with that specific Evernote note.
What Is Evernote
You can set as many of these reminders as you want following the same exact process. You can even set more than one reminder for the same note. FUT also offers a paid account with some additional features such as SMS text message reminders which work in a similar fashion. You don’t need a paid account, the free one works perfectly fine, but if you would like to use some of the advanced features it might be worth upgrading.
Evernote Calendar
Your Turn Now
There you have it, easy and free Evernote recurring reminders. The process will take you a few tries to get used to, but once you do, it is very easy. Once you figure out how the @followupthen.com emails work, you don’t have to even go to the FUT website, everything is done from within Evernote which saves you a lot of time.
Try it for yourself and set up some quick Evernote recurring reminders, it is that easy! And it will boost your productivity, guaranteed.
What other ways (if any) do you know of for creating recurring reminders in Evernote? Share your thoughts in the comment section below: