Organize Evernote With This Powerful Tagging System
Evernote can be a great digital mind, but like the brain in your head, it can quickly turn into a mess if you don’t organize it. Make Evernote better with this simple tagging system using just five notebooks and organized tag sets.
First, create these five notebooks (if you are already using Evernote, leave the other notebooks as they are):
- Inbox (for all notes you haven’t worked with yet)
- Cabinet (Almost all my notes will be sent here. It contains useful articles, book summaries, working papers from my projects and other information.)
- Memories (photos, audio recordings, videos, recordings and other important memories from your life)
- Help (all lunch and parking tickets, product serial numbers, and other miscellaneous pieces of random information that I don’t want to deal with, but must.)
- Garbage
This system relies heavily on tags to stay organized, which are much more searchable than notepads. You will need the Evernote desktop app to really manage your tags and customize your tag hierarchy.
Go to the Tags section (on the desktop, select it in the left navigation pane). You will create and use three main types of tags: .Descriptors (where the source comes from, what form the information is in, etc.). Knowledge (how this knowledge applies to your life) and Projects (how information fits in with work or other parts of your life). Each of these main tags will contain smaller tags. These main tags (and the tags of the subsequent categories) start with periods so they stay at the top of your long list of tags, but your other tags may be just words.
Customize .Descriptors tags (for example, a note can be marked as “article” or “conversation” among many other parameters), .Knowledge tags (for example, a note can be related to your work in “marketing” or your “personal development”) or … projects (for example, your note might be about “planning a wedding” or your fun pastime “collecting stamps”). The next time you think, “Oh, I had a great health article from Lifehacker,” you have several ways to find and find it among the mass of information in Evernote.
If you’re already using Evernote , make this change in small, incremental steps. Start by creating new notebooks, and then gradually transfer existing notes and tags. Then, gradually get rid of the leftover unused notebooks. Check out the full article to dive deeper into the system.
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