Revisiting My Evernote Organizational Scheme
Jamie Rubin, Evernote Evangelist for Paperless Living, posted today about how he organizes his notes in Evernote. In this helpful and detailed post about his organizational scheme, he explains the importance of having a clear set of goals for Evernote before you create or tweak your own organization system:
One things I’ve learned is that there can be as many organizational schemes as there are people using Evernote. There is no wrong or right way to do it. What I describe below works for me because it meets the goals I set out from the very start. And while the organizational scheme you choose may look entirely different, it should be based on a clear set of goals. You should be asking yourself: why are you trying to organize your notes in the first place?
A clear set of goals is something I was missing when I began using Evernote in 2008. The result is an “organizational scheme” that flirts daily with chaos. I’m still able to find notes and information when I need them, but it takes much longer than it should. I have too many notebooks and an absurd number of tags. I mean an absurd number of tags.
Early in the game, my philosophy was to tag liberally. So I did. Unfortunately, this renders my tags much less useful than they should be and causes friction every time I create a note and need to decide how to tag it. Further, I have countless tags which are being used on only one or two notes. Some tags aren’t being used on any!
Needless to say, my Evernote account needs some serious TLC. It’s a great tool and I still depend on it heavily as a part of my daily workflow. It would serve me well to invest a bit of time to do some housekeeping.
Step #1: Set some concrete goals.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
(Photo Credit: .pst)