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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'm not sure that I would do anything different... I would probably still start confused as to what to use and how. I fight with that daily. I use everything because I'm constantly changing my organizational system to the flavour of the month (Flavor spelled with a "U" for Jon).
I have ship loads of notebooks in 9 stacks each containing boat loads of notes.
Then I have 8 spaces with a truckloads of notebooks and notes in each.
Then I have a forest of stand alone notebooks with each car loads of notes.
If that wasn't enough, I have over 500 tags.
At least I do use good titles, which really helps, mostly because I usually work in "side list view".
My top shortcut, accessible via Ctrl + 1 is the search "Created:day-1" which only shows me notes created yesterday and today.
And I must say that the search tool works wonders in helping me fairly easily find stuff.
Agree re the importance of good descriptive titles. Adding a synonym or two can sometimes be helpful if you are aware that finding that note down the track might be a bit difficult. With clipping content from the web, I try to be selective about what I keep otherwise you end up with too much content and hence too many matches for a search. Never really been clear about what the advantages of Spaces are so don't really use them. One thing I find helpful sometimes is to create a master note for a given topic - it has all of the content listed alphabetically and they are all links to specific notes. The master note has a table of contents so can quickly jump to areas of interest and well as Top links so can quickly jump back to the table of contents - find that approach works quite well for me. Finally I use a text expansion utility called FastKeys (it does a lot more besides text expansion) that is set up to quickly provide search fields like title: etc. I just press .en then press the appropriate number from the little menu that pops up. So .en 1 will lead to created:week-2 and so on which speeds up searching
Thanks. I'm with you on too much content. I tend to have a clear out twice a year and get rid of notes I really don't need anymore. Keeps search clean.
I like how you're using FastKeys. I use TextExpander so will have a look and see if I can do the same.
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.
Agree. Simple is better. I'm not using spaces as much as I thought. My Training space for work jobs is used a lot but others not so much. I still just find myself heading to the notebook.
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.
All good advice. I did create a Personal Space that included a lot of my home/car/health type notebooks but I've not found myself using it much.
I'm not sure that I would do anything different... I would probably still start confused as to what to use and how. I fight with that daily. I use everything because I'm constantly changing my organizational system to the flavour of the month (Flavor spelled with a "U" for Jon).
I have ship loads of notebooks in 9 stacks each containing boat loads of notes.
Then I have 8 spaces with a truckloads of notebooks and notes in each.
Then I have a forest of stand alone notebooks with each car loads of notes.
If that wasn't enough, I have over 500 tags.
At least I do use good titles, which really helps, mostly because I usually work in "side list view".
My top shortcut, accessible via Ctrl + 1 is the search "Created:day-1" which only shows me notes created yesterday and today.
And I must say that the search tool works wonders in helping me fairly easily find stuff.
Cheers
Its whatever works for each of us. I think one of the huge benefits of Evernote is flexibility. Keep sending the U's :)
Agree re the importance of good descriptive titles. Adding a synonym or two can sometimes be helpful if you are aware that finding that note down the track might be a bit difficult. With clipping content from the web, I try to be selective about what I keep otherwise you end up with too much content and hence too many matches for a search. Never really been clear about what the advantages of Spaces are so don't really use them. One thing I find helpful sometimes is to create a master note for a given topic - it has all of the content listed alphabetically and they are all links to specific notes. The master note has a table of contents so can quickly jump to areas of interest and well as Top links so can quickly jump back to the table of contents - find that approach works quite well for me. Finally I use a text expansion utility called FastKeys (it does a lot more besides text expansion) that is set up to quickly provide search fields like title: etc. I just press .en then press the appropriate number from the little menu that pops up. So .en 1 will lead to created:week-2 and so on which speeds up searching
Thanks. I'm with you on too much content. I tend to have a clear out twice a year and get rid of notes I really don't need anymore. Keeps search clean.
I like how you're using FastKeys. I use TextExpander so will have a look and see if I can do the same.
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.
Agree. Simple is better. I'm not using spaces as much as I thought. My Training space for work jobs is used a lot but others not so much. I still just find myself heading to the notebook.