I love to write things down. If I don’t write it down, it’s bound to be forgotten. What do you use when you need to write it down? Post it notes? A spiral notebook? The back of a business card? A napkin?
That’s the problem isn’t it? When you use whatever is handy, good luck ever finding that note again. How about using my phone for notes, it’s always handy. But what app to use? I’ve tried a bunch of them, Evernote, Samsung notes, Apple notes, and even sending emails to myself, but I haven’t been able to stick to just one. This leaves me back with the same problem of not being able to find them. Enter Google Keep

Instant Notes

Put your Keep icon on your main home page, then you can longpress that icon and see the options to take a quick note:

• writing text
• taking a photo
• automatic checkbox list
• record an audio

It just couldn’t be easier to take a note on your phone.

Color Coding

When you’ve created a note, you can change its color. Either at the bottom of the note, or by tapping the 3-dot menu at the bottom, depending on the device you’re using, you’ll see dots of color. Just tap the color you want. I like using yellow to indicate that a note is something important, probably something I need to do. Green means personal notes and ideas. Orange is my color for business ideas and notes. Purple is my color for temporary notes – something I needed to jot down today but I don’t really need to keep it. You can come up with whatever works for you.

This makes it so easy to scroll thru your notes and find the appropriate note. If you want to see all your business notes, just tap the search box at top and scroll down to see the colors. Tap on Orange and it filters all your notes. You will only see the orange ones. I find this so handy.

As with most any Google product, you can also search for specific words, and it will find notes with those words anywhere in the note.

Checklists

This is my favorite feature of Keep. Each paragraph gets a checkbox. When you check it the item gets crossed off and moved down to a completed items section. You can easily re-prioritize items by simply dragging them up or down in the list. As I wrote in this previous article, I think Google Keep is the perfect ToDo list.

Unlimited Notes for Free on any device

The Keep app is available for both Android and iOS. Your notes are in the cloud so you can see them anytime at Keep.Google.com using a web browser on any connected computer. Your notes are completely private to your Google Account, yet it is extremely easy to share a note with someone. For example, you may have a shopping list shared between you and your spouse. When you add an item, they’ll see it and when they add an item you will see it.

Google Keep is completely free, you won’t even see any ads when using it. Storage of your notes does not count against your Google account (Drive) storage allotment which means it is essentially unlimited.

Learn more by watching Episode 173 of What Does this Button Do?

Do you use Google Keep? Do you use any other software for keeping your notes? Let us know in the comments below.