Right now i have Inbox, Personal Stack (Corbin’s Notebook, Journal), Tasks Stack (Active, Completed, Focus, Incubating), Work Stack (Accomplishments)

and i have some tags for categorization.

i’d be interested to learn how you have your notebook hierarchy set up — h4x0re@gmail

When I started with Evernote a year ago, I got (in hindsight) wrong footed by a blogpost describing how to do everything with just 1 notebook and tons of tags. I now try to avoid tags if possible (cuts down processing time!) and dont hesitate for a second to create a new notebook! Because as you say, the search function works perfectly well. Why tag a blog article like this with “GTD, Evernote” when every second word is just that anyway!

That’s not to say they’re worthless. I think they come into their own when categorising note content with a general term. E.g. “code conventions” is one I use a lot for articles about do’s and dont’s when programming.

I suppose, basically, I always try to adhere to the horizontal/vertical focus analogy. Notebooks are your vertical focus (hence, perfect for active projects or responsibilities) and tags are the horizontal (making them good for @contexts). I only use Evernote for reference though. It’s lack of calendar/reminder function and the lack of decent iPad GTD apps, that leverage Evernote (Egretlist looks OK, but is only iPhone) means that my ToDo lists live outside of Evernote. And so for reference only I seldom need a horizontal focus.

I did once indulge in a colourful array of “note type” tags, like .memo, .blogpost, .thoughts, .agendaLog, etc. and although I still use .memo to round up all those little “notes to self” (bit like a virtual post-it note), I soon realised I never need to focus on “only blogposts” or “only thoughts” and as mentioned already, the extra overhead of having to pedantically label everything, just meant that most of it backed up (untagged!) in my inbox anyway. Processing it all became a chore, completely defeating GTD.

@Corbin, yes just follow your gut feeling to start (or of course somebodies recommendations). It doesn’t matter too much where or how you start out, you’ll soon see if the cap fits and your system will evolve with time. If you don’t like chucking everything into personal, ask yourself why not? Is it because you don’t want to mix, say, GTD related blogposts with Gran’s best recipes or your wedding plans? Then perhaps the solution would be to factor out 3 new notebooks. Quite a handy new feature are the notebook stacks, which basically just means you can also organise notebooks hierarchically but the Ace is, if you put notebooks A, B and C into stack X, you can still view and search X as though it were a single notebook. I’d like to see this for tags!!!

What would you suggest

Was wondering what your child tags are under the parent tag “!Reference”