I'm a minimalist when it comes to tags. I have no more than 20 representing main areas of focus, including Finance, Hobbies, House&Garden, Tech, Personal (Health, etc) and Family&Friends.
I'd worry that if I created more tags, they'd become unmanageable and I's likely likely end up creating more than one tag for essentially the same instance.
I know that you can nest tags, effectively having sub-levels to a main tag level - and I'm not sure how many levels of nesting you can generate (It seems EN allows multiple levels of tag nests!)
To me, it seems like tagging everything is much like creating an index of your content, but why do that when Evernote's search function is so effective? And if you forget to tag a note, it won't appear if you search for the tag...
Do tags function if a Note is shared?
As Jon says, it depends on how your brain is wired and how you want to find content within EN. Different people will have different requirements and ways of organising - and that's one of the key benefits of Evernote - it's very flexible, allowing you to structure and organise the content based on how individual users want to manage it.
As Jon said, whether you prefer Notebooks or Tags seems to be because of the way your brain is wired. I prefer Tags. Here's why. Take the example that Jon used, where you have a Note for your monthly Evernote invoice. If Ii were using Notebooks, my brain often hurts trying to decide which Notebook the Note should go in. I could put the Note in multiple Notebooks, but that's more work, and then I have duplicate Notes.
For me, using Tags is much simpler. I use whatever Tags seem appropriate for a Note. The good news is, if there are multiple Tags that seem appropriate, I can add them all. I don't have to duplicate the Note to do this. If no Tags seem appropriate, then that's OK too. Every Note does not have to have a Tag.
My "system" for this is always changing. I don't worry about having it all defined in advance. Whenever a new Tag seems to help, I use it. I don't have to remember it later. If I do, I use it. If not, it doesn't matter. Over time, I see which Tags I'm using more and can delete the ones that I haven't used often. And over time I can add Tags that now seem appropriate, but didn't in the first place.
Evernote search, especially using Boolean, is so powerful that you usually find that Notes you want pretty easily, regardless of whatever organization you chose to use.
I've been using Evernote for many years. I have 4 Notebooks and 1,895 Tags.
As Jon said, use whatever works for you. That's the beauty of Evernote - you can use it how you want.
I've found that I'm using both tags and notebooks less and less over time. This is due to the improved note functionalities available now (table of contents, collapsible headings etc). So increasingly I just have one large note for a given topic, organized using the functionalities mentioned above. Given that such large notes tend to be almost indexes in themselves, I place a top ⬆️ link throughout so can easily jump back to the table of contents whenever needed
For my main use case for Evernote, I have one large master index. Links in it will lead off to other notes which themselves can be indices of a topic. So actually very little searching involved - more browsing the headings as it were. Because I've structured it all in a way that makes sense to me, it is generally pretty intuitive to navigate. And yes a Top link is quite useful for this sort of setup and I have them liberally sprinkled through the index notes
That's been the question since Evernote first appeared.
The main thing, as others have said, you can do what you want and change along the way. You're not locked in to anything.
I use both. Today after more than 10 years of use, I have 84 notebooks and over 500 tags. I even have tags that are the same name is as some notebooks.
I occasionally go through my tags and delete those that no longer really mean anything to me as categories.
Just do what feels right for you at the moment, you can later come back and change things around to something that suits you better as your use evolves.
Changing tags is really easy, you can select several notes and change tags on all of them
Technically, Evernote's search is so powerful, that you could have just one notebook and no tags and still find what you are looking for.
Your Evernote usage will definitely continually evolve over time, so don't let it overwhelm you.
I went through phases of all notebooks, then I got rid of them and replaced them with tags. Now I’m back to all notebooks again and have 7 tags, purely for statuses to make things easier to find. I think I’ve found my comfort zone now.
I did similar. Had a bright idea once to move all my notes into one notebook and spend days tagging them all only to hate it and move everything back again 😂
"Should I use tags or should I use notebooks"? My answer is "yes." I love tags, but you have to think through a good system. For me, it's an easy way to subdivide notebooks.
I like the idea of subdivinding notebooks and you're right about a good system. One reason I don't use tags for orgainsation is my naming convention is so tight I can usually find anything.
I mostly organize by notebooks, but do use a few tags. For example I have a notebook called travel where everything related to trips is stored. For an upcoming particular trip, I tag as "Current Travel" and use that as a filter on my homepage to keep all of my info for that trip together. Once the trip is done, I can delete the notes, or if I wish to keep the info, just remove the tag.
I use TAGs less now. "Taxes" is my largest one, to track my yearly tax information.
I like simplicity. Evernote "SEARCH" capabilities are powerful and easy to drill down.
If I find it hard to "Find" a note, then I think of reclassifying it in my system to make it "retrievable".
RECIPES is a large notebook. I can search for "muffin" and find all matching recipes. I also track when it was last made, and how I liked it. I also maintain a Recipe "paper" Notebook where I write out recipes from magazines, cookbooks, YT videos. This has helped me make all my meals from scratch. Big health gains. Evernote can improve your Health!
I have tried half-heartedly to use tags, but not in EN. I can see a use for photographs, so all sunsets, or clouds, or sunsets with clouds, would be easy to find. So far, my EN use is to replace filing cabinets and folders with paper.
I use Notes in Stacks grouped by topic, such as 'car' or 'household'. The notes themselves are dated, and the title has acronyms that fit in one line—such as 2025-04-25 AMH CRA Tn, where AMH is myself (initials), CRA is the Canada Revenue Agency, and Tn is one of the official slips to be used in filing the return (they are all T followed by a number).
If more information is needed, it goes to the following line after using /. I have a master list of the acronyms, in case I forget one or more. Why use that system? Consider how airports are identified - YYC is Calgary, Canada; YEG is Edmonton, Canada; and LHR is London Heathrow; I save lots of writing time. I seldom need more than three letters per acronym.
I'm a great fan of tags. I do use them as a status marker for a lot of notes, so that a quick search for a combination of tags quickly finds notes I need to work on. I also use them to categorise notes when you need to be a little more granular than just putting notes into different notebooks.
I think they key to using tags successfully, as with all features of Evernote, is not to overcomplicate it. For example, I tag a lot of notes depending on whether they relate to a TV show or a film, so I have "TV" and "Film" tags. So, if I needed to find all my notes about TV shows that mention a particular actor, that's very easy to do. I could go one step further, and create tags for each actor, but since a general text search works for that, there's no value in using tags for that. All those notes also have a generic tag for the project they're part of, so it's easy to exclude all those notes from a search if I need to.
I think it's also important to come up with a consistent scheme for your tags, so it's easy to add the right tags quickly. If you have to go and look up what the tag should be, that doesn't make you more productive.
Tags can also be temporary. A while back, I had a lot of notes where the text formatting wasn't ideal so as I encountered them, I'd tag them as needing their formatting fixing, making it easy to find those notes so I could process a few of them when I had a minute, removing the tag as each one was completed. Once the notes were all sorted out, I deleted the tag.
For me, the way Evernote handles tags (particular in search) is what keeps me a customer. OneNote also offers tags, but the implementation there makes them next to useless, in my opinion.
I do wish however that if you used the tag: operator in the search bar and started typing the name of a tag, a list of tags appeared for you to pick from, as it does when you add a tag to a note on desktop. I'd also like to have a way to automatically add tags based on existing tags/tag combinations.
Thanks for sharing. I like it. When I was tagging a lot I did seem to tag things where a simple search would've been quicker... over tagging! Also like the idea of temporary tags.
Just had some tag-related weirdness this morning. I was working on some notes (making changes to the text and adding tags and tasks). I noticed that the changes to the tags weren't visible in the desktop client (10.136.4). The other changes were there.
When I looked at the notes in the web version of Evernote, all the tag changes were visible. I tried signing out of the desktop client and back in, but that made no difference.
In the end, I duplicated the affected notes in the web version, and those duplicates appeared in the desktop client with their tags intact. A bit of note renaming and deleting later, and I was all set, apart from one note link I had to recreate.
Hopefully just a bit of Wednesday weirdness, but I thought I'd mention it in case anyone else has experienced the same issue.
I'm a minimalist when it comes to tags. I have no more than 20 representing main areas of focus, including Finance, Hobbies, House&Garden, Tech, Personal (Health, etc) and Family&Friends.
I'd worry that if I created more tags, they'd become unmanageable and I's likely likely end up creating more than one tag for essentially the same instance.
I know that you can nest tags, effectively having sub-levels to a main tag level - and I'm not sure how many levels of nesting you can generate (It seems EN allows multiple levels of tag nests!)
To me, it seems like tagging everything is much like creating an index of your content, but why do that when Evernote's search function is so effective? And if you forget to tag a note, it won't appear if you search for the tag...
Do tags function if a Note is shared?
As Jon says, it depends on how your brain is wired and how you want to find content within EN. Different people will have different requirements and ways of organising - and that's one of the key benefits of Evernote - it's very flexible, allowing you to structure and organise the content based on how individual users want to manage it.
Tags don't work if a note is shared on individual accounts but they do on team accounts.
20 seems manageable to me. I seem to be able to remember my naming convention better that lots of tags so I can find things pretty quickly.
My daughter can spend hours organising things and it drives me mad as I'd of done it before she finished organising 😂
As Jon said, whether you prefer Notebooks or Tags seems to be because of the way your brain is wired. I prefer Tags. Here's why. Take the example that Jon used, where you have a Note for your monthly Evernote invoice. If Ii were using Notebooks, my brain often hurts trying to decide which Notebook the Note should go in. I could put the Note in multiple Notebooks, but that's more work, and then I have duplicate Notes.
For me, using Tags is much simpler. I use whatever Tags seem appropriate for a Note. The good news is, if there are multiple Tags that seem appropriate, I can add them all. I don't have to duplicate the Note to do this. If no Tags seem appropriate, then that's OK too. Every Note does not have to have a Tag.
My "system" for this is always changing. I don't worry about having it all defined in advance. Whenever a new Tag seems to help, I use it. I don't have to remember it later. If I do, I use it. If not, it doesn't matter. Over time, I see which Tags I'm using more and can delete the ones that I haven't used often. And over time I can add Tags that now seem appropriate, but didn't in the first place.
Evernote search, especially using Boolean, is so powerful that you usually find that Notes you want pretty easily, regardless of whatever organization you chose to use.
I've been using Evernote for many years. I have 4 Notebooks and 1,895 Tags.
As Jon said, use whatever works for you. That's the beauty of Evernote - you can use it how you want.
Thanks for sharing Gene, pretty sure that will help a lot of folk. I love how brains are so different.
I've found that I'm using both tags and notebooks less and less over time. This is due to the improved note functionalities available now (table of contents, collapsible headings etc). So increasingly I just have one large note for a given topic, organized using the functionalities mentioned above. Given that such large notes tend to be almost indexes in themselves, I place a top ⬆️ link throughout so can easily jump back to the table of contents whenever needed
Nice. Do you have a strict or descriptive naming convention for your notes and headers so its easy to search for things?
I like the idea of the Top link to get back to the top... very useful.
For my main use case for Evernote, I have one large master index. Links in it will lead off to other notes which themselves can be indices of a topic. So actually very little searching involved - more browsing the headings as it were. Because I've structured it all in a way that makes sense to me, it is generally pretty intuitive to navigate. And yes a Top link is quite useful for this sort of setup and I have them liberally sprinkled through the index notes
Thanks.
That's been the question since Evernote first appeared.
The main thing, as others have said, you can do what you want and change along the way. You're not locked in to anything.
I use both. Today after more than 10 years of use, I have 84 notebooks and over 500 tags. I even have tags that are the same name is as some notebooks.
I occasionally go through my tags and delete those that no longer really mean anything to me as categories.
Just do what feels right for you at the moment, you can later come back and change things around to something that suits you better as your use evolves.
Changing tags is really easy, you can select several notes and change tags on all of them
Technically, Evernote's search is so powerful, that you could have just one notebook and no tags and still find what you are looking for.
Your Evernote usage will definitely continually evolve over time, so don't let it overwhelm you.
Welcome to the Herd!
Here is one example of tags that I use...
Recipes
Sub-tags to recipes are thinks like: Fish, Beef, Pork, Chicken, Pasta, Rice, Potato, vegetable, soup...
So then, if I'm looking for a beef vegetable soup, I filter for those tags. Easy-peasy.
I like that idea. Might try it with my recipe notebook.
I went through phases of all notebooks, then I got rid of them and replaced them with tags. Now I’m back to all notebooks again and have 7 tags, purely for statuses to make things easier to find. I think I’ve found my comfort zone now.
I did similar. Had a bright idea once to move all my notes into one notebook and spend days tagging them all only to hate it and move everything back again 😂
"Should I use tags or should I use notebooks"? My answer is "yes." I love tags, but you have to think through a good system. For me, it's an easy way to subdivide notebooks.
I like the idea of subdivinding notebooks and you're right about a good system. One reason I don't use tags for orgainsation is my naming convention is so tight I can usually find anything.
I mostly organize by notebooks, but do use a few tags. For example I have a notebook called travel where everything related to trips is stored. For an upcoming particular trip, I tag as "Current Travel" and use that as a filter on my homepage to keep all of my info for that trip together. Once the trip is done, I can delete the notes, or if I wish to keep the info, just remove the tag.
Nice. Fluid tags. Its similar to how I use them, tag and untag when I need to. Thanks.
I use TAGs less now. "Taxes" is my largest one, to track my yearly tax information.
I like simplicity. Evernote "SEARCH" capabilities are powerful and easy to drill down.
If I find it hard to "Find" a note, then I think of reclassifying it in my system to make it "retrievable".
RECIPES is a large notebook. I can search for "muffin" and find all matching recipes. I also track when it was last made, and how I liked it. I also maintain a Recipe "paper" Notebook where I write out recipes from magazines, cookbooks, YT videos. This has helped me make all my meals from scratch. Big health gains. Evernote can improve your Health!
Thanks for sharing. Do you stick to some sort of note naming convention to help find notes quicker?
No naming convention. I enjoy the creativity to name my notes in a fanciful way.
I have tried half-heartedly to use tags, but not in EN. I can see a use for photographs, so all sunsets, or clouds, or sunsets with clouds, would be easy to find. So far, my EN use is to replace filing cabinets and folders with paper.
I use Notes in Stacks grouped by topic, such as 'car' or 'household'. The notes themselves are dated, and the title has acronyms that fit in one line—such as 2025-04-25 AMH CRA Tn, where AMH is myself (initials), CRA is the Canada Revenue Agency, and Tn is one of the official slips to be used in filing the return (they are all T followed by a number).
If more information is needed, it goes to the following line after using /. I have a master list of the acronyms, in case I forget one or more. Why use that system? Consider how airports are identified - YYC is Calgary, Canada; YEG is Edmonton, Canada; and LHR is London Heathrow; I save lots of writing time. I seldom need more than three letters per acronym.
Nice system. I'm very similar with acronyms for the titles of notes and notebooks. I can remember a naming convention much better than tags.
I'm a great fan of tags. I do use them as a status marker for a lot of notes, so that a quick search for a combination of tags quickly finds notes I need to work on. I also use them to categorise notes when you need to be a little more granular than just putting notes into different notebooks.
I think they key to using tags successfully, as with all features of Evernote, is not to overcomplicate it. For example, I tag a lot of notes depending on whether they relate to a TV show or a film, so I have "TV" and "Film" tags. So, if I needed to find all my notes about TV shows that mention a particular actor, that's very easy to do. I could go one step further, and create tags for each actor, but since a general text search works for that, there's no value in using tags for that. All those notes also have a generic tag for the project they're part of, so it's easy to exclude all those notes from a search if I need to.
I think it's also important to come up with a consistent scheme for your tags, so it's easy to add the right tags quickly. If you have to go and look up what the tag should be, that doesn't make you more productive.
Tags can also be temporary. A while back, I had a lot of notes where the text formatting wasn't ideal so as I encountered them, I'd tag them as needing their formatting fixing, making it easy to find those notes so I could process a few of them when I had a minute, removing the tag as each one was completed. Once the notes were all sorted out, I deleted the tag.
For me, the way Evernote handles tags (particular in search) is what keeps me a customer. OneNote also offers tags, but the implementation there makes them next to useless, in my opinion.
I do wish however that if you used the tag: operator in the search bar and started typing the name of a tag, a list of tags appeared for you to pick from, as it does when you add a tag to a note on desktop. I'd also like to have a way to automatically add tags based on existing tags/tag combinations.
Thanks for sharing. I like it. When I was tagging a lot I did seem to tag things where a simple search would've been quicker... over tagging! Also like the idea of temporary tags.
Just had some tag-related weirdness this morning. I was working on some notes (making changes to the text and adding tags and tasks). I noticed that the changes to the tags weren't visible in the desktop client (10.136.4). The other changes were there.
When I looked at the notes in the web version of Evernote, all the tag changes were visible. I tried signing out of the desktop client and back in, but that made no difference.
In the end, I duplicated the affected notes in the web version, and those duplicates appeared in the desktop client with their tags intact. A bit of note renaming and deleting later, and I was all set, apart from one note link I had to recreate.
Hopefully just a bit of Wednesday weirdness, but I thought I'd mention it in case anyone else has experienced the same issue.
That's an odd one. If it happens again export your logs and send in a support ticket and let me know.