I’ve gotten a few questions about how I use tags and notebooks in Evernote. Now, while I think one of the cool things about Evernote is that you can set it up however makes the most sense to you personally, I realize it helps to see how other people do it, if only to rule out what doesn’t make sense for you. So in that spirit, here’s the system I’ve developed so far.
My primary notebook is creatively named Default, and that’s where all of my notes start out and most of them end up. All but two of my other notebooks (Dish Network for day job stuff and Images for notes consisting entirely of pictures) are named for various writing projects, including a notebook for JeffKirvin.net. As you can see from the item counts, if you factor out the work and image notebooks, none of the project-oriented notebooks come anywhere near the size of the main notebook. They are handy, though, for quickly seeing everything related to a specific project in one place.
Tags are harder to keep organized. I have only six top level tags, and could probably get rid of two of them if I tried. But out of those, I really only use the first two (and their subtags): !GTD and !Reference. They’re prefaced with exclamation points so they sort automatically to the top.
The !GTD tag itself is never actually used at all. But it contains all my GTD contexts, as well as another tag, !Vision, for more Covey-style planning, goals, roles and values stuff.
For the vast majority of stuff in my Evernote database, each note will have either one or more @ tags representing the context in which I need to address the note contents, or it will be tagged simply with !Reference. I used to use a lot of keyword tags, but over time found I couldn’t keep them standardized well enough and that Evernote’s built in content search was more than sufficient to pull up notes I might have forgotten otherwise.
The only other tag worth mentioning is Bookmarks, which is where I put stuff that formerly would have gone into Delicious or Foxmarks (now Xmarks, or so I hear). Though honestly I’ve gotten so accustomed to typing whatever I’m looking for into the search bar on my browser that I hardly use bookmarks at all anymore. Starting to see a pattern here?
good stuff. Question: is there a way you can display items WITHOUT a tag (perhaps to filter/display only tagless items?
thanks!
There is. You can build a saved search with the syntax: “-tag:*”. This will select all notes without any tags at all. You can specify a notebook or span all notebooks.
I can’t figure a way to search by tags only. I prefer to tag items like “bills.” It would be nice to search for “bills” without bringing up every note or document that has the word “bill” in it, like an article about Bill Clinton for example, that isn’t a bill at all.
The only way I can figure to do it is to click on the tag. But I have so many notebooks that my tags are way down at the bottom of the screen …
Hey Jeff,
I see that you have close to 3000 notes in Evernote. Have you noticed any slowing down? I’m fairly new to Evernote, but not new to notetaking. I have almost 6000 notes in a PC Program called Personal Knowbase. I’m thinking about moving all that to my evernote account, but was just wondering about whether this would overload the system. These notes are solely text notes. No graphics.
It definitely takes longer to sync, especially on the iPhone. Normal workflow in Evernote itself seems pretty quick.
Hey Jeff — great post! I’m a huge fan of Evernote as well (see here: http://bit.ly/9xMAG6). I always feel like I’m struggling with conformity of tags. Like you, I created parent/child tags, which proved to be helpful — but even then, over time, I noticed I don’t really pay attention to them. I just search “tag:x tag:y” and maybe even save the search. Ultimately, I’ll end up getting rid of a lot of the tags as its just taking up space.
My specific question for you is about your GTD contexts — though I professed my love for RTM, I’ve been using Nozbe because of its integration with Evernote (really cool!). Are you using GTD for your tasks/to-do lists or do you keep those there to match what is in your to-do list? Thanks!
I’m using Egretlist for my iPhone, which allows me to set up a full GTD implementation using just Evernote and checkboxes in notes!