AMA 46: If you had to start fresh with Evernote today, how would you set it up?
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This week on Ask Me Anything about Evernote we have a question from Sam.
If you have a question you’d love an answer to then leave it in the comments below and I’ll add it to the list.
Sam asks
If you had to start fresh with Evernote today, how would you set it up?
That's a great question!
My Evernote has evolved so much over the last 17 years and think there's a couple of techniques I use now that I didn't back then.
When I started my Evernote in 2008, I just threw anything into notebooks. I didn't bother to title any of my notes and it was all a bit of a mess.
Finding notes was hit and miss and involved a lot of scrolling.
If I was starting again, I would use a strict naming convention which is what I do now.
Every note has a proper title based on:
WHO WHAT WHEN
So, my notes look something like this:
Ovo Electric Bill August 2025
Evernote Invoice July 2025
Bob Bobson Meeting Notes 18th August 2025
This naming convention makes it so much easier to find things.
Something else I would change is holding back on the number of notebooks.
I had way too many when I started and I was way too specific about my notebooks.
I would have notebooks around certain topics for each year.
For example, a clients set of notebooks would look like this:
Bob Bobson Meeting Notes 2013
Bob Bobson Meeting Notes 2014
Bob Bobson Meeting Notes 2015
Bob Bobson Projects 2013
Bob Bobson Projects 2014
Bob Bobson Projects 2015
And so on…
I now just have a notebook for meeting notes and projects and use the naming convention to tell me what year.
I've slimmed down my number of notebooks to 100 but I could still go further. When I have some time, I'm going to work more on this.
I also made a HUGE mistake around 2016 when I went all in with tags.
Someone persuaded me to strip everything back to one notebook and tag all of the notes.
It took me ages to set this up and it lasted about 6 weeks before it became an absolute nightmare to manage. I was spending more time organising my notes than writing them it was a huge time sink for me.
It then took a huge amount of work to setup all the notebooks again and go back to how I was doing it.
I think I ended up with around 600 tags and couldn't remember any of them so I was scrolling away trying to find tags to apply to notes.
For me, a naming convention works much better and quicker.
I hope this helps.
I think all of our Evernotes have evolved over time but let me know in the comments what you would do differently if starting afresh.
Have a great rest of the week
All the best
Jon
Good advice Jon. Like you, my EN structure has evolved over the years. I would agree that minimising tag usage is essential - if they're not easy to remember or find in a list, it's just too much extra trouble. For deep granular categorisation, use Evernote's excellent search features.
On the question of how many notebooks, work out the best for YOU. I think the Stavcks feature is helpful to manage the list views. E.g. I have a stack called Houdeholfd which contains 4 notebooks: Gardem, House, Motoring, Utilities - because that's what works best for me. I have another stack called Finance containing notebooks: Bank accounts, Credit Cards, Investments,
Pensions, Savings. You might feel that Spaces would serve you better than Stacks - decide what woks best for your workflow. It's one of the joys of Evernote that it's very flexible.
I've just settled on one stack for a specific project and then a Main notebook.
I use tags a lot for the notes in the project stack, but they're all tags I know off by heart.
For the main notebook, that's just were everything else ends up. I do have some high-level tags for those notes as it can help with searching but nothing like as detailed as for my main project stack.
I think the simpler you keep the structure the better. I've tried adding stacks and spaces, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly and I went back to a simple structure.