Whether you’ve been using Evernote for nine minutes or nine years, you’ve no doubt seen how it can help you (or your entire team) become more productive at work.

But the road to greater team productivity is far from smooth. Paradoxically, the very apps promising to liberate us can actually make it harder to get anything done, by creating more places for our ideas to hide.

Here at Evernote, we believe the secret to getting more done isn’t more apps, but making sure that the apps we do have play well together. Jotting down a thought or finding an idea worth sharing often happens when we’re doing other things, such as chatting with co-workers. That’s why we’re so pleased to announce a new integration with the highly popular messaging app, Slack. Evernote is where you keep all your ideas, and Slack connects your ideas to other people. By removing the friction between these two tools, you can now spend less time searching and more time doing.

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To get started, here are the top three ways that Evernote and Slack can bring your ideas together and help you achieve more.

1. Create a ‘note to self’



Evernote has always been about capturing ideas at the speed of thought. How many times have you had a brilliant idea, only to find that a pen and paper—or their digital equivalents—are nowhere in sight? When you’re in the middle of a conversation, the last thing you want to do is stop to look for somewhere to write it down… and then forget where you put it.

This can occur even in productive environments, such as Slack conversations with co-workers. Your thoughts might be related to the subject at hand (“I need to review next month’s sales numbers”), or they could be completely unrelated (“I need to buy bread on the way home tonight”); either way, if you don’t capture that idea immediately, “I’ll jot it down later” can all too easily turn into “What was I supposed to remember?”

Stay in the conversation and in the flow by using the /note command. Think of it as your digital scratchpad, a place where you can jot down your ideas and thoughts, create a to-do list or a reminder—all without leaving the conversation in Slack. Got another idea or three? You can add to your note over the course of the day, and review it in Evernote when you’re ready. Don’t worry, the note will be private to you—invisible to your conversation partners in Slack—and it’ll be safely waiting for you in Evernote when you need it later.

2. Clip attachments…or entire conversations (and search inside them later)



Evernote allows you to harness your team members’ collective brainpower, so you can capture ideas from anywhere and keep related information together. With this new integration, the next time your team is having a particularly fruitful conversation in Slack, use the /clip command to save those messages—based on date, importance, or URL—as a note in Evernote. Later you can search your notes to recall the details of that market-busting idea (because you shouldn’t have to come up with all the brilliant plans alone, right?).

You can also save images, PDFs, and documents from Slack conversations to Evernote so they’re easy to find when you need them. When an image or document is posted in a Slack channel, use /clip to save that message to a new note in Evernote, where it will be stored for future reference. Save whiteboard brainstorming sessions or shared files, and find what you need later using Evernote’s text recognition ability.

3. Share your knowledge with the team



TEAM: “Can you pull up last year’s sales results for us?”

YOU: “Hold on, I know I have them saved somewhere.”

And then the search begins. Sound familiar?

You’ve got better things to do than switch apps and then manually dig through endless nested folders to find the information you need; leave the digital forensics to the experts. Evernote organizes all your data in one place where you can find it easily, and with the /find command you can now search for the specific note you need and share a snapshot with the team without leaving Slack. All you have to do is enter any search term and Evernote will present you with the top three results. Don’t worry about accidentally sharing this information with the people in the Slack channel—until you decide to share the results, you are the only person who can see them. To share them in Slack, click “Post here” and everyone in the channel will be able to see the note. No archaeology degree required.

Bonus tip: one more way to share with the team

OK, we promised you three tips, but because we’re so excited about this integration, here’s one more: If you already know which note you want to share with your team, simply copy and paste its URL into Slack to share a preview of the note. Evernote will show the entire note (as long as it’s under 4,000 characters) and the largest image in the note.

Productive teams get things done

Steve Jobs, a man who knew a thing or two about harnessing the power of teams, once said, “Great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.” Connecting Evernote and Slack makes it easier for your team to collaborate, share knowledge, and achieve great things. Find out more here or try it for yourself today.



Note: This integration is available in English, German, French, and Spanish. Additional languages coming soon.