An easy way to instantly find notes in Evernote

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Many people dislike Evernote simply because they don't know how to use it. If you don't organize your notes, they will turn into a heap of junk, among which it is very difficult to find the information you need. In this article, we'll show you how to create a convenient note management system and instantly find the notes you want from hundreds of your notes.

Core Principle: Tags, Not Notepads

Many Evernote users treat this cloud-based service like regular, real notepads: they create a whole bunch of notebooks and distribute their notes across them.

Yes, at first this method seems quite convenient, until you have accumulated several hundred notes, some of which are suitable for several notebooks or, conversely, are not suitable for any of them.

And with all that, you're missing out on one of the coolest ways to manage your posts - the tagging system.

Basically, tags are almost the same as notebooks, with the only difference that the tagging system is much more flexible and allows you to find records much faster. And here's how to use it.

Step 1. Create notebooks

You will need notebooks anyway, whether you use the tagging system or not. But in the case of tagging notebooks, you will need much less.

Five is enough to organize any number of notes.

1. New notes

Here you can place all the notes you just created that you haven't worked with yet. Notes remain in this notebook until you define tags for them and move them to another notebook.

2. Working notes

This section will store all useful notes: interesting articles and collections, some data on projects, useful links and other information that may be required in the course of work.

3. Memories

In this notebook you can store all the notes with entertainment information and memories: photos, audio and video files, important personal letters, poems. Everything that is not related to work can be stored here.

4. Miscellaneous

In this notebook you can store all the information that is not suitable for either work or entertainment. Any prescriptions for food, doctor's appointments, fines, and other information.

5. Cart

Everything is clear here.

Step 2. Create tags

Instead of putting your note in a separate notebook, create a tag and attach it to your note. For example, instead of a Weekend Meals notebook, you can create a Weekend tag and attach it to any notes that are somehow related to the weekend.

The plus is that after you've marked all the dishes that can be cooked on the weekend with the tag "Weekend", you can tag some of them with the tag "Sweet", and others - "Baking". At the same time, with the tag "Weekend" you can mark a list of films that you can watch in your free time, or a note mentioning a cool cafe, which you have been going to for a long time.

It doesn't work that way with notebooks. You won't be able to shove one note in three different notebooks, and copying it back and forth is even worse - this way you get confused faster, and you run out of disk space faster.

Step 3. Organize the tags

There isn't much you can do with notebooks - combine multiple notebooks into one collection, that's all. And with tags, you can build a whole hierarchy, distributing them in the order that you need.

For example, you can create the following hierarchy: descriptions, information, projects (do not forget that tags are automatically sorted alphabetically, and so that they line up in the order you want, you have to use dots and hashtags).

The tag category ". Descriptions" will contain all tags associated with the content of the note. For example, if there is a mention of people - you can use the "People" tag if the note stores information about blogs and sites - the "Resources" tag will do if the information about visual content is "Images".

The next group of tags ". Skills" includes tags that are associated with different areas of activity. If the first group contains tags related to the content of the note, then the second contains tags indicating a specific area.

For example, there might be tags "Marketing" or "Meditation" or "Running". In the end, if you find a great resource that has a lot of information for runners, tag it with Resource from the. Descriptions category and the Running tag from the. Skills category.

The third category of tags can be called ". Projects" and tag all notes from this category that relate to your work affairs. You can insert tags - the names of projects, so as not to confuse exactly, for example, "Lifehacker", "Stuff" and others. These tags will be assigned to absolutely any notes that somehow relate to this project.

Now let's imagine that I need to find the text for a running infographic that will be published on Lifehacker. I can find this post by several tags: Images from. Descriptions, Running from. Skills, and Lifehacker from. Projects.

It doesn't take long to distribute tags, and then you can safely fill your Evernote with hundreds of different notes and quickly find them.