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A quick kind of how I’m using it type of article this week.
It would also be really good to hear how you’re using the Evernote MCP and AI Assistant and if its improving your workflows and productivity.
The Evernote AI Assistant has been out for just over a year now and its seen a lot of improvements
The Evernote MCP has been around for 3 months so far and if you’re not sure what it is, in simple terms it connects any AI tool to your Evernote account so you can save notes to Evernote or pull information from notes to help you complete tasks.
To make it easier to connect to Evernote, ChatGPT and Claude now have purpose built connections. In ChatGPT search plugins for Evernote and in Claude look at connectors.
You can read more about the MCP here.
I use both quite a lot.
In fact, I use AI quite a bit now. Probably around 40% of my work is now inside ChatGPT. It’s not making decisions for me or thinking for me. It’s doing the donkey work.
My job is training and consultancy, so people pay me for my knowledge, which goes back almost 30 years. I get paid to help find solutions to problems.
What I don’t get paid for is building a PowerPoint deck, choosing which icon would go well on a certain slide, or picking colour schemes for a bar chat. This is the PITA admin work.
I now get ChatGPT to do this so I can spend more time thinking.
My job basically means I have a lot of information inside Evernote, web clips, PDF reports etc, but I also need access to things like Google Analytics, Search Console, Mailchimp data etc.
I use MCP’s to bring all this data together in one place.
Over the past few days I’ve been thinking more about how I use the MCP and the AI AI Assistant and I use them in very different ways.
What I’m using the Evernote MCP for
I’ve noticed that I’m using the MCP when I need to connect multiple apps together.
I have around 20 apps connected to ChatGPT from Evernote and Google Analytics to my social media scheduling software, invoicing system and CRM. It’s all connected.
This means I can talk to all these apps in natural language inside ChatGPT and bring data from all these places together.
Here’s a real life use case from last week.
A client calls me and says their website traffic has been gradually going down over the last six months and they want to know why. Is it a website issue? They think it’s because of AI tools giving answers instead of folks having to click to their website to find the answer, but we need to find proof of this happening.
The process worked a bit like this.
I had a Teams meeting with them and recorded the meeting in Evernote. I then transcribed the meeting and created a summary.
Inside ChatGPT I asked the AI to go to Evernote and look in the meeting note for the issues and pain points the client was raising. I then told it to go to Google Analytics and Google Search Console and see if there was any data to prove their assumptions.
In the old days, I would spend an entire afternoon sorting through spreadsheets worth of data, not any more.
Within a few minutes, I had the data analysed and ChatGPT had looked through 12 months of website traffic, where it all came from, what search words were used and a lot more.
It gave me the data in an easy to read format.
I then proceeded to use my own brain to come up with solutions now we knew what the problems really were and asked ChatGPT to then produce a final report and save it to the clients notebook in Evernote.
All the donkey work of laying out the report, building graphs and charts was done by the AI looking at different apps, including Evernote. This gave me more time to make the actual decisions.
Another quick use case. I’m building a time tracking web app right now, mainly because the apps already out there just offer much more than I need. I have ChatGPT connected to my code editor, my local development server and my test server. A lot of the work is being done inside ChatGPT.
One thing I have always hated about software development is documentation! Writing down what you did so someone else can understand it was always tedious and a right PITA.
I get ChatGPT to create all my documentation now and it saves it on the server in Markdown format and then at the end of the day transfers and updates all the documentation in Evernote so I can read it in normal format instead of burning my eyes on plain Markdown. So much quicker.
So, I use the MCP to join apps together.
What are you using the MCP for? Let me know in the comments.
What I’m using the Evernote AI Assistant for
I use the AI Assistant when I want to question or dig into notes that are inside Evernote. The AI Assistant doesn’t connect to any other app, just Evernote which is great.
If I’m trying to find a specific piece of information that’s inside Evernote I’ll use the AIA as its much quicker than using the MCP server. It’s almost instant.
Here’s a couple of recent real life use cases.
I’ve just booked a weekend away in a hotel I go to quite a lot. Last time, I really liked the room I was in so I asked the AI Assistant what the room number was when I stayed at the hotel last time. Its in the receipt.
It just gave me the room number and I asked them If I could have that room again.
A simple request that would’ve taken me a few minutes to sort out but the AIA told me in seconds.
Another quick real life use case.
I was on the phone a few weeks ago with a prospective client and I’d done some work within their industry before and I wanted to explain something I found out from the previous training session. I would normally have to find the information later and email them, but I asked the AIA whilst I was on the phone, got the info I needed, sounded “really’ knowledgable on the phone and got the job right away.
A final little use case. The time tracking app documentation I mentioned above, I was trying to find out what variable signified a workspace so I just asked the AIA in Evernote and it found the info quickly.
So that’s how I’m using the AI in Evernote right now. Not a lot of organisation going on. I do use it to manage my receipts and rewrite the titles but not that often as I keep on top of this job manually.
I hope this article kind of fires off a few workflow ideas and experiments.
I’d love to hear how you’re using the MCP and the AI Assistant. Do you use one or the other, both, do you use them for different purposes? Let me know in the comments.
Have a great weekend
All the best
Jon