Chris Badgett of LifterLMS talks about how to kill the course building chaos with Evernote guru Charles Byrd in this episode of LMScast. Charles shares his story of how he became an online course builder and why and how he built an Evernote course. He also shares how Evernote has reduced the amount of stress in his life, added efficiency to his daily work, and helped him succeed in business.
Often we have a great idea, but it escapes our mind before we get the chance to write it down. Evernote is a phenomenal information tracking tool that allows users to create notes whenever they think of something they want to remember later. It acts as an external memory storage for your brain.
Evernote is an easy way to store information and have the ability to access it when you are at your computer later. It helps you store information ahead of time and is as a proactive way to manage productivity, so that later all the information you need is in one place. It is important to manage your time well so you can get the most out of it.
Chris talks about the four different skillsets found in people associated with the most successful courses, that are generally not associated with others. Evernote can help you organize your business so you can focus on the more critical areas that will make your business successful. Continuous improvement and becoming better at your craft is something that Evernote can help with. Evernote helps you become a stronger expert by adding efficiency to your process. It also helps you get your thoughts out and maintain a productive workflow.
Community building is essential for a successful business. Charles has set up a way he collects the feedback he receives in Evernote. The software can also help you build relationships with clients and partners. You can easily access notes that you take in meetings with them, so that in the next meeting you can start where you left off. Charles attests to how this has helped him with building strong relationships. It can also help you keep tabs on contacts and stay well organized.
Thank you for joining us on this week’s LMScast. You can post comments and subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast.
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and today we have a special guest, Charles Byrd. He’s an Evernote expert. He has a course on Evernote called “Zero to 60 with Evernote,” and we’re going to get into that, and we’re going to get into how to use Evernote yourself as a course builder. But first, Charles, thank you for coming on the show.
Charles Byrd: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris Badgett: I’ve noticed a trend in the online course world with software. It’s usually not the company that makes the software that makes the best training or the course on how to use this software. I’ve just noticed that. I don’t have a reason per se. I’m still waiting for somebody to build the killer LifterLMS course or the … but I think like there’s a guy, Joseph Michael, who has a course, Learn Scrivener Fast, and you just see it where like the people that teach you how to use your computer software aren’t the people making the software. It’s just an interesting trend. Can you tell us the quick journey of how you became a course builder, and why Evernote, and how it came to be?
Charles Byrd: You bet. I worked in Silicon Valley as a director at a big software company, and couple of my friends had started businesses in the Bay Area making wooden sunglasses and wooden watches. That was the first time I realized, “Wait, my peer group can start companies and be successful at it? No one told me.” So then, I thought, “Well, great. What wooden product can I make?” I went to them, and they’re like, “No, digital products. Digital products. No inventory. No shipping. No this. No that.”
Pretty much literally when the big light bulb went off over my head and I’m like, “I’ve been doing this stuff anyway. I’ve been putting on corporate trainings for 6,000 people. I’ve been producing videos. I have a technology background.” So it was funny that I didn’t notice that before when I decided to build an online course.
Then, I just listed out different topics that I could teach on, and there was about 40, and then I narrowed it down. “What am I actually really good at?” That narrowed down to about 12, and then I just thought, “Off this list of 12, what has personally helped me the most with everything I do every day?” and Evernote was the top of that list, and so I did probably a minuscule amount of research just to make sure there was a market for that, googling the topic, and then just said, “I’ve got to start somewhere. That’s exactly where I’m starting,” and so that’s how I dove into the topic like very early on.
Chris Badgett: That’s really cool, and how long has this journey been from picking Evernote to where you are today?
Charles Byrd: Okay, so I’d say probably … Well, a little over a year. Probably a year and a half, but I’ve been managing some other things, other investments, and things I was working on, so when I actually dove into it is just over a year ago. I pretty much had the course in pilot, and then I discovered our common friend, Danny Iny, and his Course Builder’s Laboratory, and snapped that up, and so that was helpful to give me a framework for really launching the course and making it more successful.
In that process, I also started booking partners for Danny for different promotions, and that was very helpful in learning both not just how to make courses and launch, but the invaluable relationship side of course building because when we build courses, we want to get them out to people, and learning how to leverage joint ventures and like different people with audiences already that would be a match for that is an amazingly powerful platform to grow a business very quickly. We can talk a little more about how that transpired too.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us a little bit about like how your course sits today. Is it like a side project? Is it like a full-on business unit or full-time job? In this year or year and a half, where are you today?
Charles Byrd: Okay, so to break that down, I had the course going, but I was booking partners for Danny for nine months, and then that got me pretty good at building relationships and aligning partnerships. The whole time, he was my biggest clients over that nine months. I did six webinars, and one of them was to the Project Management Institute because I’m a certified project manager, but six.
Then, I started booking a lot more for my course. Now, I book two to six webinars every week through partners, and it … Danny and I agreed it didn’t make sense for me to continue booking his when my course was taking off, so since going full-time at that, which was about five months ago, we’ve grown the list from somewhere around 600 people to 8,500 people, and it’s growing at a rate of 2,000 a month. We’ve reached 500,000 people in the last five months.
Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s really incredible. That’s really incredible. If you’re listening to this, this podcast, go ahead and make sure that you’re on the LifterLMS email list because we’re going to be doing a webinar with Charles very soon so that you can get more. We’re going to cover a lot of ground in this episode, but we’re going to go deeper in how you can leverage Evernote to achieve some of these results like you’re hearing about here.
Let’s transition, Charles, to talking a little bit about … get a little bit tactical with people on Evernote. On this podcast, we talk a lot about the challenge or the chaos if you will, and I know you’re the “kill the chaos guy” that course creators face.
Charles Byrd: Right.
Chris Badgett: I’ve been around course creation for quite a while, and I noticed that … I’ve been involved in some like really big launches, and I’ve seen things that are doing okay and some things that aren’t going well at all for the course creator. The difference between the ones that are really successful and then the ones that are not so successful are … There’s these four different skillsets that need to happen, which are not only … It’s very unique to find the abilities in one person, so maybe the secret to cracking through is getting another contractor to help with something, or a business partner, or grow the team.
Those four areas that I’ve discovered are community building, the actual expertise itself like becoming really good and sharp at something. Evernote in your case, and not looking at that as like, “Okay. I got it. I’m good. I don’t have to get any better.” We all know what it’s like to have a teacher who’s teaching the same curriculum from 30 years ago or whatever.
The third category is instructional design, and then the packaging of the course, and formatting the learning experience from an organizational, and multimedia, and strategic perspective. Then, the fourth area is to wrap all that in technology, learning management system, a membership site, an online course, what have you. If we go to the first part, community building, how can we leverage something like Evernote for community building? Before you answer that, just in case someone listening hasn’t heard of Evernote, can you describe what it is?
Charles Byrd: Certainly. Yeah. 92% of the audience as I speak in front of around the US and Canada, 92% have heard of Evernote. Three-fourths of them have Evernote, and then I’ll ask, “How many of you have it and know you could be making better use of it?” It is inevitably three-fourths of the hands shoot up there.
Basically, Evernote is a tool that is on every platform you could imagine, and it is a way to … a platform to create information whether you’re writing it, whether you’re capturing your own ideas, recording your voice, bringing in pictures you’ve taken, so you are the author and source of the information, or you can also collect information from all kinds of sources because we’re hit with broad of information that comes at us from all directions via email, the web, paper documents, receipts, on the cell, on the phone, at work, and at work.
It is enough to drive you crazy, so I like having and teaching about having systems and tools that you can trust and workflows that enable you in Evernote’s case to collect that information from all those sources whether it’s paper, business cards, handwritten notes. Basically, anything from the web.
You can drag files in there. You can, as mentioned, record your own voice or even search for text within pictures, so you can take a picture of a sign, or a menu, or this, or that and search for words inside the photograph. Again, it’s a place for you to get things off your mind or capture them, and a place to collect from other sources. That’s, in a nutshell, what Evernote can do as far as …
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.
Charles Byrd: Yeah. The neat thing is it can become the hub of where and how you track information, and in the webinar that we’ll do, I’ll teach people how to put their finger on anything within five seconds basically just using tags, and search, and a few best practices, and you can be up and running very quickly with that superpower.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. How would I leverage something like Evernote for community building?
Charles Byrd: Okay, so for community building, that could be done various ways. Let’s start out in the research phase. You want to figure out who your audience is so you can find those communities. Google is your friend. Facebook is your friend. You can start finding people in the areas that you want to be a leader in or you want to contribute to. Basically, by doing the research and then using Evernote to start collecting that research, you can use a tool called the “Web Clipper.”
Let’s say you found this perfect Facebook group or this great community online, you can capture that information right in Evernote and tag it with “research for community building,” some ambiguous note title like that tag. It can be used that way, or if you’re researching for specific leaders in the space, you can capture all of that in one place.
The whole idea is the internet is a very big place, but if you can find what you need and then capture it so you can assemble the information in a simple, defined way. Let’s say you’re doing research for your course. It’s an amazing tool for outlining and capturing the topics that you want to teach about. You could just start with a simple outline, and then start on the research to populate the different subject areas that you plan to present on.
Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. That’s really cool. I think it’s like if we’re building a community or trying to figure out these Facebook groups that we should be a part of or we need to start on, what ends up happening, if you live in a world of chaos or just being a human being, is you forget like, “Uh.” You see this great web page or you see this article about this person. Tomorrow, you might have forgot.
Evernote is like outsourcing your brain and your memory so that you can actually … It’s not that you can hold more. It’s that you can let go, de-stress. It’s got a place. You’ve got an organizational method. You go in there and pull it out, and that’s super powerful because it’s all about the fundamentals. If you are looking to develop relationships in your industry, it’s important to have like a list of people you want to keep in contact with, and then you can time block some time on your calendar to make sure you reach out, and connect, and deepen relationships. A tool like Evernote just makes that whole process organized.
Charles Byrd: Yeah. I really like how you articulated that. It’s getting things off your brain, and of course, the Evernote icon is an elephant. It’s memory. You can remember basically anything. In fact, the last call I was on before we were chatting here, the woman introduced me to some new tool that is similar to Infusionsoft. I’m not going to remember the name of that tool, but I just used the Web Clipper and tagged it as “tools of interests.”
I can pull up all kinds of unique tools that otherwise, you’d be like, “Someone told me about a tool, but what was that? Where would I even find it again, and who introduced me to that?” but I can tag it with “tools of interests,” maybe the product name, and the name of the person who introduced it. If I go, “Oh, Chris was telling me about a tool. What was that?” now, I have a path to find it very easily, or if I’m like, “What tools of interests?” you can just pull up a list, and the info is very easy to find.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. What if I’m an expert in something and I want to teach online, or I’m already teaching online and I want to get better at my craft? How can you use Evernote for getting better at being expert in your chosen field?
Charles Byrd: Yeah. Again, with the research for one. Number two, just getting your own ideas and workflows out. I do this all the time because one thing I found being … I’ll call it an expert in certain areas. Certain behaviors you’re doing that make you successful, you don’t realize you’re doing them, so sometimes you need to stop and break down, “Oh, this is one thing I’m doing in this process that’s making it work,” and you actually just write the step down.
That happens frequently where I’m doing something unconsciously that’s effective. Then, when I realized it, that’s the little bell in your head that goes, “Ah, time to write this down in Evernote,” and then you can tag it with whatever the project you’re collecting that for name is or just tag it with ideas. Just an easy to get back to it, to refer to when you’re actually in front of your computer, and you’re trying to assemble course content.
Briefly, back on the relationship side. Evernote s invaluable for that. Every meeting I take, the first thing I do is open a new Evernote note, and as we’re chatting, I’ll tag it with your name. I’ll tag it with the word “notes,” and then if we’re talking about learning platforms, or launches, or research, you can simply tag the conversation based on what you guys talked about if you’re doing introductions for each other. You can add a tag for that.
That way, we can talk a year from now, and I could pull up every conversation we’ve had and pick up right where we left or off and any important email you sent me. In fact, the one you sent out recently covering all the main features of LifterLMS, it’s like I can just pull that up and watch it any time because it’s captured all in one place.
To answer your question about how it can make you a stronger expert, it lets you get your thoughts out, your processes out. It lets you collect and augment those from external sources such as the web, or if you went to a conference and they had info on that, you get some handout, you can snap pictures with your phone, get it right into Evernote tagged and word-searchable straight out of the images. You can run it through the Evernote scanner. I’ve got one right there.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. If you’re a leadership expert, or a marketing expert, or a health and fitness expert, or a technology expert, I think the big takeaway here is that you’re capable of so much more, and it’s not that you need to become a cyborg and merge with the machine. It’s just about augmenting. You can basically empty the cup a little bit and allow … You can carry more with you just outsourcing some of the organization and cataloging to something like Evernote.
If you teach a special kind of yoga and you go to retreats in India or you’re researching some science that you’re going to combine with some yoga and some nutrition, and make this interesting thing, and run experiments on yourself or whatever, you need a way to enable that creativity for, “Oh, okay. I heard this little tidbit of science that I might try to integrate into my practice or whatever.” That’s really cool.
Charles Byrd: Yeah, and that’s right when you’d capture it. Speaking of the trip to India, I travel a ton. I was in eight cities and five countries in January and did 14 live webinars, and so every one of these trips, I just make a new note and tag it “travel,” tag it whatever city, or mastermind, or event I’m speaking at, and then I just have like four or five basic lines. One says, “Flight.” One says, “Hotel,” or, “Airbnb,” “Meeting Agenda,” “Talking Points,” or whatever I’m speaking about.
It’s the cleanest thing ever, and you can just make a shortcut to it, but all of those hyperlink internally within Evernote to … When I want the flight info, I just touch “Flight” and it goes straight to my flight info, so you can integrate it into your everyday workflows no matter what you’re doing. Certainly, for course building, but everything else in your business and your life to just simplify, so you don’t have to hunt for the confirmation email in Google about your trip itinerary because it’s just one touch away on something you have sitting in your hand waiting for you. It’s being proactive and just having systems that you do every time that just make everything easier. Will it make your life perfect? No. Will it help a lot? Absolutely.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah, and I like the way you say that. It allows you to be proactive and make your life easier. File note on that is then that makes space for something else to come in whether it’s a creative idea, or extra time, or less stress. These are all good things if you’re working on an expertise and a passion that you love. Now, let’s talk about the actual active course building. In instructional design like, “Oh, what am I going to do? Like am I going to do a video course? Am I going to have office hours? Am I going to have a webinar? Am I going to do a mastermind? Is it going to be passive income, or is it going to be highly active?” As I get into all these instructional design questions, how could I use Evernote?
Charles Byrd: You could map out what your different options are, what the pros and cons are, what the fastest way to monetize so you don’t drown in the meantime. You can make … Plan out like the simplest approach to get started and what your next iteration will be to build on it because something I had to fight and resist in myself was I’m like, “Well, if I make an Evernote course, I need to cover absolutely every piece of the tool, how you could use it in any situation.”
People don’t want that. They want to know how to get up and going quickly, so if you’re at all battling the concept that you can’t release this course because it’s not perfect and doesn’t cover everything, please do yourself and your students the favor. Just get started because anything that’s lacking, they’ll let you know about, and anything that’s great, they will let you know about that too, so you can keep optimizing and iterating.
Also, note that every time I work with a partner, at the end of a webinar or promotion, I ask them, “What do you think could be better about the webinar? What do you think could be better about the course?” because they go through the course too. You’re constantly eliciting feedback that’s collected in Evernote under a tag like “continuous improvement” and the name of your course.
Later, when you’re like, “Okay, cool. I’m going to walk half a day and just keep improving this course,” now you’ve got this easy place to go get your checklist that otherwise would have been forgotten or would have been lost in inboxes, would have been on handwritten notes left somewhere in your office that you’d never get to, so what you’re doing really is enabling is your own opportunity and your own path to create the best thing you can while getting it out there sooner.
Chris Badgett: I love that. I love that, and if you’re researching, if you’re seeing what other people are doing, and you like want to catalog different types of courses, or sales pages, or whatever that you can come back to, and look at one place, and go, “Okay. This is what I see is the industry seems to be doing.”
Charles Byrd: I do that all the time. I’ll see something, and whether or not I’ll be using what they’re offering, I’ll tag it as example like, “Here’s an example of the landing page that I like. Here’s an example email copy that seemed effective because it got my attention.” You can just capture them that way as they … One of the biggest secret is doing it in real time. If that little “ding” bell sound goes off in your head of, “Ah,” that’s your cue. Capture it in Evernote right now, and then you’ll have it when you need it.
Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. What is the difference between like a project management software like Asana, Basecamp, Trello? Like you could capture ideas in there in those tools, but what makes Evernote special and different from project management tools?
Charles Byrd: Okay, so these two things are different. They do play very nicely together, and I use all of the above. Evernote is still the core repository collection, idea generation, and capture space, but like out of a meeting with your team, inevitably, there’ll be actions as there should be, so basically, you can capture the core ideas or goals of what you’re doing. Then, when you start breaking those down into tasks, then go right ahead and put them in Asana, or Trello, or Basecamp.
This is how I do it. Let’s say you and I had a meeting, and we’re working on a smaller project together. We’d talk through what we want to do, who’s going to be responsible for what. Then, we start breaking it down into actions, which are put in the project management tools, but I’ll just make a link to the Evernote note or notebook that has the bigger collection of ideas.
When you do get around in working on a task two weeks from now, you’re like, “Okay. I get this, but I wish I had a little more context.” It’s a click away. You click the hyperlink. It takes you to the Evernote note where you’re like, “Oh, yeah. That’s what we were talking about,” and then you’re off and running. They work together seamlessly by simply a couple best practices like hyperlinking to the notes that generated those tasks.
Chris Badgett: It sounds like the way you tag things is very intelligent, so is it … It’s also like the way you can search and find things, right, because I’ve noticed with project management tools, if you use them for something like you would use Evernote for it, once the bucket gets too full, you can’t even look at it or it’s not as useful, but …
Charles Byrd: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: What’s your tag 101 philosophy? We don’t have to go super deep on it, but like how do you use tags, or how do you organize? As the bucket gets full, like how do people look through it?
Charles Byrd: Yeah, so probably, it depends on the context. I might be a little more conservative with tags in a project setting like Asana, but in Evernote, I used to not want a bunch of tags because I didn’t want it to get too crazy, but what I found is it’s okay to be generous with tags. You still want to be intelligent with the naming of the tag, and you will develop muscle memory for what a good tag would be.
In general, I’ll use between one and three tags per note, and they’re pretty basic. Let’s use the meeting with you and I. I would use your name as a tag. That’s pretty straightforward, and then depending on what we were … I use a tag called “notes” so I can pull up notes from any meeting, and then I would base it on the context of the discussion. If we were talking about a book launch, guess what the tag would be, and then that’s basically it.
Like if we were both working with a third-party company or if we were both using some other third-party tool, I’d throw that tag in there as well. You don’t need to go nuts with them, but they give you this very powerful path to find information depending on the context you’re bringing things of them on. If we were talking about a launch, I can pull up the tag “launch,” and our notes will happen to be there, or if you call me tomorrow or sent me a text asking me for something, I can pull up your name as the tag and see where we left off.
It enables multiple paths back to information based on the context that they’re coming up again or you’re thinking about them again. Yeah. I think it can be a little bit generous with how you use tags like if I’m going to any particular city, I will tag the note like “Toronto,” or “San Diego,” or wherever as well because it just gives you one more access point to get back to that like, “I thought of this great idea in San Diego. What was that?” You could search the tag “San Diego.” You can search the tag “ideas.”
Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. I think we really overestimate how much we actually remember like I think we do forget a lot of things and that’s … but I know that feeling like, “Oh, I had this great idea at that business trip in San Diego like what was that?” because you got this …
Charles Byrd: It’s the worst feeling to not … and every time, you will trick yourself. You’re like, “This idea is so amazing. There’s no way I’ll forget it.” You’ll forget it in 10 minutes. Write it down. Write it down. Period.
Chris Badgett: Yeah, and the relationship stuff. You know like your deep relationships, but if you’re doing things where you’re interacting with a lot of people, but in a high-touch way, you may get on the phone with somebody or enter into a conversation, and they’re like, “Hey, Chris. Remember the last time I talked to you about blah, blah, blah,” and like you’re frivolously like searching through your email to be like, “Who is this guy? I don’t remember him at all.” You don’t have to do that if you literally map it with Evernote and curate your relationships a little bit.
Charles Byrd: You’re right, and I will tell you. The reason I’ve been able to get partners like Brian Tracy, Asian Efficiency, The Productivityist, Chris Winfield … The list goes on, but it’s because I’ve been able to keep in touch and basically track where I’m at with each person like where we left off, what they’re focusing on that I could contribute to. If you don’t write that stuff down, you may not remember it.
I also use Evernote in conjunction with a CRM tool called “Cloze,” C-L-O-Z-E, and it integrates with your Google Calendar, and Gmail, and Evernote so that any emails from you or meetings we’ve had would show up there. Any Evernote notes with your name in them will show up there in that way because I meet with probably two to five people a day. I think I’ve got eight meetings today. Yeah. It is probably the only method you’d be able to use to really deepen those relationships and see exactly where you left off, and that’s how I’m able to book two to six joint venture webinars every week.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s really incredible. Let’s talk about technology, using technology for your course. I know because at LifterLMS, we get tons of email like five-paragraph emails like, “Does your platform do this, this, this, and this?” or, “I was here, but I didn’t like this platform.” and, “Can you help me?” All these things. People do a ton of research before investing in an online course software, and the big reason for that is because they’re going to be tied to it for a while. They’re going to invest all this energy and build all this stuff. They want to make the right decision, so how could Evernote help with that person trying to figure out or optimize the learning technology piece?
Charles Byrd: Okay, so when you dive into the research, you’re going to be starting to find those sites that compare who does what, what their pricing is, the different models, the strengths, weaknesses, pros, cons. Evernote is perfect for that because, A, you can capture your own thoughts on the way. B, as you are on the sites, you can start capturing them with the Web Clipper into Evernote, so later, you can compare these things, and it is really important.
I come from a technology background, and even I was surprised how many tools and integrations can be involved. In fact, there are some rarely smart people with a lot to contribute, but they’re afraid of the technology because there are so many pieces. What I found when I was doing my research, you guys, for the WordPress site were the top of the list. Just like unequivocally, that’s who I recommend to people. I also was checking out some of the solutions such as …
Chris Badgett: Like Kajabi?
Charles Byrd: Kajabi, and actually I opted for Kajabi. I built everything in there because it was simple and integrated, and then found this simplicity was also very limiting because there was lack of customization, lack of duplicating of training courses, and it was sad for me because the platform was great, but not for someone like me who needs a little more horsepower.
I opted to be able to … I went with ClickFunnels for the funnel side because it’s very flexible and powerful there, but now that I’ve got a course that’s successful and out to thousands of people, I want to be able to track how far along are people are. I want to offer gamification. I want to offer quizzes, and I want to offer a membership area.
As our team expands, we’re up to five people now, we’re looking at revamping the course, and we want more powerful course tools, and so I’ll be back in the same boat of figuring out if we’re going to just up level where we’re at or change platforms to something a lot more powerful and integrated like Lifter.
Chris Badgett: Cool. Very cool. If you’re listening to this and you’d like to find out more about Evernote, make sure you’re on the LifterLMS email list. We’re going to be sending out invites to this webinar that we’re going to do with Charles and really go deeper into how to use Evernote and why it’s awesome, but let’s talk a little bit about the why.
You’re known as the “kill the chaos guy,” Charles Byrd with Evernote. Why? Like how do you help and just tell us? Talk a little bit about the why, and I just want to say that a lot of course creators I think carry it and even heavier than average amount of overwhelm simply because they’re creative. They have all these ideas. They’ve got this course to build, businesses to run, students to teach, families to feed at home, or whatever like it’s … They got a lot going on, so help the listener.
Charles Byrd: Yeah. Yeah. I’ll speak to my why. It’s actually a story I tell frequently, but before I do, I had a call I think yesterday with a guy who wants to build courses, and he was saying how they were building lead magnets and running Facebook tests to quizzes to figure out what type of course content would be the best received, and that was falling to this and that.
I’m just like, “Dude, just don’t do that. You’re going off the deep end into the technology trying to make this perfect thing instead of just sitting down and building something. Just make a Facebook post saying, ‘I’m thinking of making a course on these three things. Where should be most useful for you?’ Done.” Like I just saved that dude three weeks of unnecessary work.
Chris Badgett: Right.
Charles Byrd: As far as the big why, I’ve been an Evernote fan for a long time. I’m a certified Evernote consultant, and I just remember my mom. She ran a hospital in Central California. She was a teacher for College of the Sequoias and a floor nurse in the PE Department, so she’d come home with all these boxes of … those cardboard office boxes full of binders, and papers, and this, and that. Like boxes and boxes of them, and it was like just normal for the job, but also ridiculous because like carrying that back and forth doesn’t help, so I did what any good son would do. I got her a brand new Mac and an Evernote scanner, and taught her how to use that.
It really started improving her whole workflow, her quality of life around it, and she’d tell her students all about it and got them very excited. Then, basically, one day, I got a call. I was working at this Starbucks, and my mom and stepdad had that serious tone in their voice and something. Maybe one of the kids they adopted who were in trouble at school or who knows. Instead, my mom had been in a minor car accident, and then the next day was reaching for a fork and kept missing it like repeatedly, so they took her to the hospital. Found she had two stage four brain tumors. She went into surgery that night.
Anyway, the outcome of that was then we had to transition all her work for her three jobs. We had to start researching the hell out of medical care. Basically, the office went from being messy to you couldn’t even see the desk under all the papers, and her inbox stopped accepting emails. Anyway, I used the same tools I gave her to fix that problem, so we could put our finger on anything, get her the best care, and what it did was it improved the quality of her life. She lived one year from when we found that out.
She had a better quality of life, better care, and it also made me realize that we only have a certain amount of time here on this place, so if there are things we want to do, we need a system to kick their butt. We need a way. We need systems we can trust. We need tools and workflows that enable us to do what we want to do in the time we have, and if it’s a quality of life question, how much … Do you want to be overloaded, and buried, and drowning, and stressed? I would venture to say probably not.
If I can teach you a path to really turn the volume down on that, that’s my passion. That’s why I decided to make this course. That’s why I reached thousands of people every week and month with this message because if I can improve your life and enable you to meet your goals, that’s going to have a ripple effect for all the people you interact with, people you serve, your own families and your own mental health. If I’m successful at this, which so far so good, and you are successful based on learning a new trick, or two, or three by coming to our webinar, then everyone wins, and that’s the power of course building.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I really appreciate you sharing your story with us and your why. That’s awesome. Thank you for doing that. All right. If you’re listening, be sure to sign up and be on the mailing list at LifterLMS so you can hear about Charles’ webinar, and he’s going to go a lot deeper into this. Charles, I really want to thank you for coming on the show. I had so many aha moments, and one of the things I’m going to do is I got Evernote several years ago, and then I stopped using it, but I’m going to recommit especially with the way you were talking about.
I’m a power project management guy and communication. I am juggling a lot of things. I’m going to recommit and go through your training. I definitely appreciate learning from someone who’s like honed the craft which you have with Evernote, so I’m going to recommit to Evernote, and see what I can do with it, and see what that does for me. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find out more about you or connect with you, where can they find you?
Charles Byrd: Sure, so we’ve got … To get info on our company, it’s byrdword.com, B-Y-R-D-W-O-R-D.com. We’re also big fans of killing the chaos. We have killthechaos.pro. It has a little info on the course, but I’d like to encourage you to sign up on Chris’ email list because when we do offer a webinar to the community, we’re all part of here. We’re course builders. I want to line up a really nice discount for you guys, so if you do go to killthechaos.pro, that’s the full price which … Buy that if you like, but I prefer you get it at half off working with Chris here. Yeah. Chris, such a pleasure to be on the show with you. Thanks. Thanks for having me on.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you for coming, and thank you for inspiring me to get going and start leveraging Evernote, so thank you.
Charles Byrd: You bet.
