Going Paperless: Using Evernote to Remind You to RSVP to Invitations

This will be a short tip today, as I am attending the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop in Laramie, Wyoming this week, but one that has been particularly useful to me, ever since Evernote released its “reminder” feature for notes.

I have never been invited to so many parties as I have since the Little Man started at his school, nearly three years ago. Birthday party after birthday party, year in and year out. Sometimes it seems that the Little Man comes home with an invitation to a birthday party every other week. These invitations inevitably need to be responded to. I think people tend to fall into two categories when it comes to RSVPs:

1. You respond instantly.
2. You never respond.

Ideally, you could remind yourself that you need to mail in your response, and recently, this is exactly what I have been doing with Evernote, in a sense, killing two birds with one stone.

Paper invitations

When an invitation arrives these days, here is what I do:

1. Scan the invitation and RSVP into Evernote.
2. Toss the RSVP card into my paper bin on my desk (this is the bin of paper that I typically scan in each day, although these days it rarely has paper in it.)
3. On the note in Evernote created for the RSVP card, I add a reminder, setting it to remind me to RSVP a week or two (depending on how far out the party is) before the deadline.

Then I can forget about it. When the reminder date finally arrives, Evernote will remind me to mail the RSVP card and out in the mail it goes (unless I’ve already mailed it).

Scanning the RSVP card is also useful in case you lose the original, which, for someone who uses less and less paper, is always a possibility.

Paperless invitations

These days, more and more invitations arrive electronically, and you can RSVP by email. However, just like with paper invitations, I don’t always know far in advance what our schedule will be like on the day of the event. In the case of paperless invitations, what I do is the following:

1. View the email invitation in Gmail (in the Chrome browser)
2. Use the Evernote Web Clipper to clip the email message to Evernote (this is a new feature of the Web clipper).
3. Add a reminder to the note in Evernote, setting it to remind me a week or two in advance of the response deadline.

In both cases, the reminder is added to the list of reminders in Evernote and I no longer have to worry about remembering to reply. Evernote will remind me well in advance of the deadline. This has made it much easier to handle the myriad of birthday invitations the Little Man receives. And of course, now that the Little Miss has started at the Little Man’s school, the frequency of these invites will only increase.

But you can also imagine using this for other invitations, like weddings, baby showers, Halloween parties, etc. Let Evernote remember it for you. And let it remind you to send the RSVP. It makes life just a little easier.

If you have a suggestion for a future Going Paperless post, let know me. Send it to me at feedback [at] jamietoddrubin.com. As always, this post and all of my Going Paperless posts is also available on Pinterest.