I used to know only a few terms with blended. Blended martini was the first, I think. After entering the corporate life, I learned about blended fee. The latest what I learned was blended learning: a way where you combine traditional ways of learning  in the classroom with learning through e-learnings, blackboards and webinars. The term stuck to me as I pondered about the lost art of writing and my beloved Moleskine notebooks. I kept me busy as I found a new use for my notebook with bullet journaling. And now I think I might have find a way to connect the writing notes with digital notes. Presumptuous as I am, I call it Blended Note Taking. Let me introduce you.

1. Set up an Evernote Premium account

You may be familiar with Evernote. But if you really want to connect the dots between your old school notes and your Evernote account, you’ll be needing a Premium account. Why? Because of hand writing recognition software. With a premium account, the pictures of your handwritten note are searchable. I don’t have to explain how useful this is, right?

The easiest way to get yourself a Evernote Premium account, is by buying the special Evernote x Moleskine Journals or Cahiers.

2. Set up your Moleskine Journal

Choose any format you like. I’m trying to get to familiarize myself with bullet journaling. But you could use GTD or any other format of journaling, tasking and note taking the way you like. I like to add tabs to my Moleskine note book, dividing the notes used for different Evernote note books. The prettiest and easiest way is by sticking some washi tape at the end of the paper. If you numbered your pages, you can index the tabs as well.

3. Photograph and file your written notes

So going into a meeting, lecture or just drawing, just take your Moleskine and write, draw and doodle away. Writing is still the fastest way of note taking for me, as a I naturally write things down in a mind mapping way. I pick a fresh page after a tab the note belongs to, write the date in the left corner and leave space for tags that I add afterwards. At the end of each day, I take a picture with the Evernote document camera of each note that needs filing and add the necessary tags. You can add several photographed pages to one Evernote note.

You don’t need a special Evernote Moleskine note book for this, nor a Moleskine note book. You do want that premium account for handwriting recognition though.

4. Extra: set up IFTTT

To really get this blended filing going, you can add a internet-automatization service like If This Then That or Zapier. With these services you can create shortcuts between different apps. I created an Evernote album in my iOS photos, and through an IFTTT prompt, all photos posted in this album get uploaded to Evernote. You could even create special iOS albums connected to Evernote note books. So you’ll photos get filed to the right note book immediately.

Another nice prompt is connecting Dropbox with Evernote. This is useful for linking finalized documents in Dropbox to your Evernote notebooks. Just as with iOS photos, a folder in Dropbox is linked through your web automatization service with an Evernote notebook. Every file that is saved in this folder is accessible in Evernote through a link.

How do you keep your written notes connected with your digital ones? Share your tips in a comment!

Day 16 of Writing 101Today’s Prompt: Imagine you had a job in which you had to sift through forgotten or lost belongings. For inspiration, ponder the phrase “lost and found.” On day four, you wrote about losing something. On day thirteen, you then wrote about finding something. So, today’s twist: If you’d like to continue our serial challenge, also reflect on the theme of lost and found more generally in this post.

I didn’t follow today’s prompt and twist that literally. I chose to combine my first post on writing and the second one on journaling to the logical next step, which for me was digital journaling. 

This is NOT a sponsored post (although Moleskine or Evernote may contact me anytime if they want to).