Evernote Naming Conventions. Share Your Strategies and Acronyms.
A huge thank you to Robert who has become a paid subscriber over the last week and many thanks also to Jean who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported and I very much appreciate your generosity.
This week's post is a bit of a crowd sourcing, collaboration, get the comments going type of post and I'm really interested to hear about your naming convention(s) and if you use acronyms as part of it. Let me know in the comments below.
Naming conventions are a topic I've touched on many times and I believe creating your own naming system and sticking to it can solve many organisation and retrieval issues.
My own convention is simple:
WHO WHAT WHEN
I make really descriptive note titles, for example.
Evernote Invoice May 2025
Car Tax Receipt December 2024
SW Conversion Report April 2025
I've used this naming convention for years and it really helps when searching for specific notes plus I can use the intitle: advanced search for finding specific words in a title.
intitle:Evernote
I also use acronyms together with this naming convention for a lot of my project, clients and contacts, both work and personal.
For example, any notes relating to Taming the Trunk start with TTT.
Other acronyms I'm using right now are SW, LL, KA.
All of these relate to clients I'm working with so their note titles look something like this:
TTT Live Calls
KA Landing Page
SW Mailchimp Setup
LL Conversion Report
This helps me find client or project notes really quickly and a lot of the time I'm using the quick switcher (CTRL + Q or CMD + J).
One thing I must mention is that I don't use acronyms for everything. For me this would become too complicated and unwieldly. I just use them for specific projects or clients.
For example, if I used CT it could mean Car Tax or Council Tax. I would rather title these as Council Tax or Car Tax to make them easy to find.
The more acronyms I use the more I'd have to remember.
It’s why I'm not a huge fan of tags as you need to remember them all so you can tag notes. For me it would become a pain having to scroll a list of tags or acronyms when I want to title notes. I try and use my memory as much as I can.
This is why my main descriptive naming convention works for me for the vast majority of notes. I can look at the note and then title it WHO WHAT WHEN.
Acronyms are only for selected topics like projects and clients and always at the beginning of a note.
Do you use acronyms in your naming convention or something else? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear how you organise things.
Have a great weekend
All the best
Jon
For notes that relate to a specific date such as receipts or tickets, I prefix with YYYY-MM-DD and then include the name of the company and the item. If it's a booking I add the reservation number to the title so I can access it even if Evernote decides not to load the note (it has happened despite me having everything selected for offline access.
For example:
2025-03-25 Apple MacBook Air M4 receipt
2025-06-02 easyJet flight EA12345
I have seen my naming conventions for notes evolve over the years and I always wanted a link with the file folders of my computers. When I discovered the PARA approach of Tiago Forte I learned that I was already doing most of it, but with a little twist for my own purposes. So I use a list of 4 letter acronyms which relate to areas of responsibilities and interests. There are roughly 15 of these and they cover most of my life. Any note, notebook, or file folder always start with that. I double that with using the same acronym in a single tag, which help with search and exporting. So i.e. HEAL concerns anything health related, HOME is about the house, what’s in and around it, FOOD are recipes, diets, etc. You get the idea. Next I indicate if it’s a Project with short term goal associated, then a description of the contents and I conclude with a status item – adding year means the project is finished and archived, OH means on hold, anything else means it’s ongoing. This gives examples like: MONY Tax 2023, HEAL Dentist, TECH Buy iphone OH, HOME Dishwasher Brand Modelname, etc.