In short, think of it as a place to store, tag and sort you digital life. You’ll likely find use for it outside of your illness management, but I’ll let you have the pleasure in finding ways to include it into your routine. I’ll detail how I use Evernote to specifically help keep my IBD and ostomy life organized. It was a great way to keep tidbits of information organized, but it’s expanded in functionality over the years and I use it for just about everything. I started using it primarily to collect web articles, write short notes and that sort of thing. I’ve been a user of Evernote since 2008 and have over 13,000 notes in my database. I still think it’s an excellent tool and still recommend it, but there have been many self-hosted and open-source alternatives to hit the market since I originally wrote this post.

UPDATE: In 2021, I moved away from Evernote and replaced it with a more local solution.

I don’t want the following post to sound like an ad I just want to share with you how I’ve used this software to manage my Crohn’s Disease and my ostomy. Keeping track of medication, medical history, a symptom diary, a food log, prescription receipts or important articles can get out of control pretty fast, so if you were to ask me for a single solution to keep this chaos in order, I’d tell you it’s Evernote.

Managing a chronic illness can be daunting.

Travel journal evernote templates