You've been using Evernote for years , With all your life stored in your account. Everything used to work so well. But that meticulous notebook structure is now nothing but a blight on your existence.
Trying to find a specific note? You can also try to find a fart in a wind storm.
But remember, the problem is not with Evernote here. Evernote is actually an amazing tool. You're just organizing your notes in a way that can't be scaled. Although there is a solution. And it's a solution that can work for anyone, no matter how many notes you try to keep above.
Evernote has three layers to its organizational structure. It's pretty simple, but you need to understand it to get the most out of the app.
First they are notebooks . These are like “folders”, where you keep individual notes.
Next are stacks . These are like the main folders to help better organize your notebooks.
When most people start using Evernote, they notice these notebooks and stacks. It's probably a hangover from organizing your files in Windows the same way. But Evernote's notebooks and stacks have two main problems.
As your note library grows, these issues will almost certainly turn your otherwise organized notes into a complete mess.
Luckily, Evernote has a third organizational tool:tags . You can assign descriptive and searchable tags to each note to help organize your notes in a granular way. You can also nest these tags and assign multiple tags to each note. Problem solved.
If you have a complex system of notebooks, your first challenge is to reduce them to as few as possible.
Before reorganizing my own account, I had over 40 individual notebooks. Now I have five. You, however, could choose to have only two or three. These new notebooks are simply a way to organize everything. extremely usually. The real organization comes later..
The most important of your few notebooks should be the initial notebook created for you when you set up your Evernote account. By default, this is called “[username]'s Notebook”. Rename this to something like “-Inbox” or “-Collection Box” to make it more descriptive.
Tipping: Placing a symbol like “-” before the notebook name keeps the notebook at the top of your list of notebooks.
This notebook is where you will keep almost all of your new notes by default. When you create a new note through the mobile app, or take a screenshot with the Evernote Web Clipper, the New Evernote Web Clipper is the ultimate saving tool The New Evernote Web Clipper is the ultimate saving tool Evernote Web Clipper content is not new. But if you haven't heard of, or maybe didn't like the Evernote clipper in the past, now is the right time to re-investigate it. Read More This saves you the hassle of tagging each and every note as soon as you create it.
Batching is much more productive than tagging Time Blocked:The Secret Weapon for Better Focus Time Blocked:The Secret Weapon for Better Focus Looking for a more efficient way to organize your work days? Try time lock. This time management tactic can help you stay on track while keeping distractions, procrastination, and unproductive multitasking at bay. Read More Having all these new notes in a single notebook like this makes tagging fast and simple.
You should create any other notebook sparingly. The more notebooks you create, the longer it will take you to decide where each note belongs. And the more difficult it is for you to find notes later.
Since this new system relies heavily on labels to organize notes, notebooks are hardly necessary. If you take this to the extreme, you could create just one another notebook called “Archive”.
Tipping: Avoid putting spaces in your notebook names and labels. This makes searching much easier.
After tagging each note in its “Collection Box”, just move it to your “Filing Cabinet”. This way, you will always know where you are doing. And if you have a decent tagging system, it's easy to keep a large number of notes organized with just two notebooks. More on this later.
I chose to create some other notebooks, however.
Your own notebook structure will be different than this for sure. Just keep in mind creating notebooks sparingly. The more notebooks you have, the harder it will be to keep everything organized.
Like I said, your notebooks should be the broad foundation of your Evernote structure. The essence of your system must rely on tags .
The non-scalable option here is to tag notes with a couple of general topics, and I hope you'll remember these tags in the future. Good luck with that!
The scalable option (a small sample of my own tags below) is much more elegant.
Essentially, by tagging each note you want to know a few things about it:
The system I am defending does just this. When I tag each note using this system, I know I want to tag these three specific things about that Every note should have at least one tag that relates to each of these three points. This makes it very easy to sort and find notes on a granular level.
For example, when I review the highlight below from Jack Kerouac's book On the Road , I can see at a glance that I have marked all three points. This is a personal note (ie not work related), it's a book note, and it's about life and travel.
Your own individual markup taxonomy will be different than mine. But a relatively similar structure is an extremely scalable way to organize your notes. It takes some time to get used to this, but it will soon become second nature.
When it comes to finding notes in the future, two features are especially helpful:the search bar and saved searches.
By using the search bar, you can search for multiple tags to find exactly what you're looking for. Let's say you remember keeping a note of a conversation you had with a friend about traveling to Brazil. If you tagged this note correctly, the following search will bring up that specific conversation.
This is the real beauty of using this type of labeling system. Looking for a quote about politics? No problem.
Tipping: Placing numbers before labels like this helps you know that you have assigned labels for each of the three areas related to each note. This ensures that you cover all angles to help you find notes in the future.
For searches you find yourself doing routinely, set up a saved search. To do this, configure your search. At the bottom of the search box, you can also add other parameters like notebooks, tags, keywords, etc. Below, I've set up a saved search for work-related ideas.
When your search is complete, click Windows File> Save search , On Mac, click Edit> Search> Save Search , and name your search. From now on, when you click on the search box, you will see a link to that saved search for instant results. You can also drag the saved search to the shortcuts widget for even easier access.
There is no point in spending more time labeling your notes than necessary. Fortunately, you can automate this in some areas. The main way to do this is by using the IFTTT automation platform (if so, then).
You can use IFTTT to connect different services. Capture your creative ideas instantly with the simplicity of IFTTT Capture your creative ideas instantly with the simplicity of IFTTT. Setting up a central system to keep track of your ideas is worth the time and effort it takes. Your creativity and productivity will thank you. Here is a simple way. Read More You can then tell the platform to save certain types of notes in certain notebooks. You can even assign specific tags.
I have this setup to save all my Instagram posts to my reference notebook and tag these 1personal, 2instagram, 3travel.
I am also addicted to reading articles on Instapaper. Become an Instapaper power user. With these 6 cool features Become an expert Instapaper user with these 6 cool features Despite an impressive adoption rate, many of Instapaper's features often remain unexplored. Let's take a look at some of them. Read More So it makes sense to have another automation setup that saves all my Instapaper highlights to my portable CollectionBox, labeled “2 content notes”. This saves me time labeling everything in my CollectionBox each week.
For a more complete list of how IFTTT can work with Evernote, see here.
This method may not seem as simple as just dragging and dropping your notes into lazy notebooks. But it is much more scalable. Coming soon:
This tagging system (or something like it) can help you locate specific notes in flash. Keeps everything much more organized How to Organize Your Out of Control Reading List Right Now How to Organize Your Out of Control Reading List Right Now A reading list serves many functions, from practical to inspiring. But it can also get out of hand. Using these tips to manage your reading hobby can do wonders for your life. Read more than most other systems out there. And it stays organized no matter how many notes you have.
If you decide to go ahead with a system like this, it will take a while to reorganize your Evernote library. But once you've gotten into the routine of labeling your notes like this, you'll start to realize just how useful Evernote can be.
Is this a system that you think could work for you? If not, how come?
