Streamline Your Creative Workflow in Evernote by Eliminating Tags

Tags can be useful for organizing, but they can also get in the way of your notes. Maybe we should ditch tags altogether in Evernote.

This is a post by performance expert Thiago Forte, who explains a few of the downsides to use, or at least a heavy reliance on tags:

When you rely heavily on tags, you need to remember exactly every tag you’ve ever used, as well as how it is spelled and punctuated. The “parent” tags that create dropdown menus are not the solution — you just tap on a tiny list of options to choose from.

[…] As good as your brain is at recognizing patterns, it is terrible at storing and playing many patterns precisely because the patterns of neuronal activation interfere with each other. But this is exactly what you are doing when trying to remember the correct tag. What an awfully unnecessary waste of mental resources.

Forte also notes how annoying it is that the creation of a new tag happens automatically when you start typing, even if you have a similar tag that may only be slightly different (misspelled, capitalized, plural, etc.) …

But the most important reason you might want to stop tagging everything is because tags can make you less productive and creative:

The real problem with tags, and why they not only fail, but even hurt people’s creative self-esteem, is that they give the impression that keeping a useful collection of personal notes requires nothing more than a heroic feat of comprehensive planning. followed by years of painstaking, unwavering cataloging and annotation. Thus, I see how many creative people, rightly overwhelmed by this task for which their mind is not equipped, completely abandon this idea.

To learn more about using Evernote to promote your creativity, visit the link below.

Evernote and the Brain: Workflows for Creativity | Evernote

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