It's time for my bi-annual Evernote clear out!
Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for Mac & PC is 10.96.5 and you can grab this from the Evernote download page. Latest mobile version should be 10.96.1 and this will arrive via app-stores.
I'm not a hoarder. I like a nice clean and tidy Evernote. I like my search results to make sense. I like to keep things simple.
These are the main reasons I have an Evernote clear-out twice a year.
July and December are quieter months for me so I take advantage of this to clear things out and see if my workflows are working for me.
What notes to get rid of!
I ask myself a couple of questions about old notes:
What are the chances of me ever needing this information again?
Do I want to keep this note for nostalgia?
If the answer is there's an almost zero percent chance I'll look at the note again and I don't want to keep it for nostalgic reasons then it gets deleted.
For example, I've just deleted the receipt for a pair of jeans I bought in February. They fit, they are fine and I don't need the receipt anymore so it goes. I can never see myself in 5 years’ time wanting to know how much I paid for a pair of jeans in Feb 2024, I don't care!
On the flip side I've kept receipts for cars that I bought years and years ago. I don't need them as the cars are long gone, probably scrapped by now but for nostalgic reasons I may want to look back and see how much I paid for my 1979 Ford Capri 1.6 Laser, it was £850 and I bought it in 1988!
I also go through my Archive notebook and delete anything I don't need.
My .Inbox notebook gets a clear-out and there’s usually a bunch of screen shots and web clips that can go.
My Travel notebook gets looked at. I don't need the train times and hotel details for a job I did last January. It gets binned.
I'll spend the next couple of weekends going through all my notebooks and deleting lots of notes.
Finally, I go through my Trash notebook and delete everything older than 2 years.
I look through all my tasks
As part of my workflow checks I go through all my tasks and work out if I still need to do these things.
I'm not the sort of person that sticks to doing the same thing year after year. I find this unproductive.
If I look back on the last 10 years my life has changed a lot. Kids left home, divorce, house moves, changes to the work I do. I can't possibly be doing the same things every day that I did five or ten years ago. I'm a different person now.
I look at all my recurring tasks and ask myself if I still need to do all these things. Can I change things to free up time? I usually find a few I can delete.
Automation check
I have some small automations set up. My invoicing software and CRM email notes into Evernote about client invoices being created or payments being received. They all get tagged #Flow and appear in my home screen in a filtered widget.
Twice a year I check to see if these automations are still needed or do I need new ones?
Tags
I'm not a tag person but I still check tags and remove any that are not needed anymore.
I only have five of them and I've just deleted one so down to four!
Daily notes check
This feature isn't rolled out yet but I've been testing it for the last few weeks and hopefully it will arrive very soon for everyone.
I don't journal. All my daily notes relate to work and I don't have one for every day, for example if I'm out on the road for work I won't need a daily note.
My daily notes appear on monitor two of my setup tiled in a browser window with my Evernote tasks.
I've decided that I'll keep Daily Notes for 3 years and then as part of my bi-annual clear-out I'll start looking through and deleting/archiving anything older that’s not needed.
A quick check list
Here's the final checklist for my clear-out:
Check notes in all folders - do I need them?
Check tasks are still relevant
Check automations are still relevant
Check for unused tags
Check Daily Notes
Look at my Evernote CRM workflow - can I change anything?
Empty trash older than 2 years
Do you have a clear-out or do you keep everything forever? Does it impact search or make things more complicated if you do? Let me know in the comments.
Have a great weekend
All the best
Jon
This is good advice and has inspired me to look through my notes and get rid of some of the cruft and consolidate some notes to keep things tidy.
I'm not as organized as you. And in my years of using Evernote, I have never settled on one particular system, other than using Stacey Harmon's approach employing very disciplined naming conventions for notes and notebooks. I use task switcher mostly for finding notes. If that doesn't give me an immediate result, I can usually find something in few minutes by looking at my naming categories, and applying filters. Heres's the cleanup part: in the course of doing that, I often find notebooks that have gotten disorganized because I haven't applied the naming conventions consistently - so I will make a note to come back there and clean up, and usually I do that in a day or two.
I've been reluctant to delete things because of AI search. As I think you have posted previously, the more info in the account, the ore likely AI search is to be productive. ("Evernote, those jeans I bought last year have gotten too tight. What size were they?") I'm still struggling to make AI search work for me, but I can see the potential.
Finally, re: your reorganization, I'm seeing an unusual number of oddities in my Evernote account, I think likely to the server-side work on syncing and the "monolith.." You might want to be careful about making a lot of changes right now... chances for glitches are higher now than normally, I think.
Thanks for the great articles each week. You're in good company - you and Ethan Mollick of Wharton School AI fame are my favorites!
Vinnie