Evernote Nested Tags



  1. How To Use Evernote Tags
  2. Evernote Tags Vs Notebooks
  3. Evernote Delete Tag
  4. Evernote Nested Tags Html
  5. Evernote Tag Hierarchy
  6. Nested Tags Evernote Ios

Evernote’s Notebooks

Take beautiful notes, save important information, and find what you need—when you need it. Evernote helps you simplify your daily tasks, so you can accomplish anything. If you’re on your desktop, you can nest tags on the desktop to provide some visual organization, but those nested tags won’t display in the Evernote app on your iPhone. Instead, on your mobile device, you’ll see an alphabetical list of all your tags, nullifying any advantage you have to the desktop organization of your tags. From using Evernote tags to match your mood to creating a calendar, Francesco D'Alessio finds surprising uses for Evernote for business productivity. Nested tags done right. Posted by 9 hours ago. Nested tags done right. All i want is bear’s tag-system in evernote.

Source: MakeUseOf

You’ve been using Evernote for years , with your entire life stored on your account.

Everything used to work so well. But that meticulous notebook structure is now nothing more than a blight on your existence.

Trying to find a specific note? You may as well try to find a fart in a windstorm.

But remember, the problem doesn’t rest with Evernote here. Evernote is actually an incredible tool . You’re just organizing your notes in a way that can’t be scaled. There is a solution, though. And it’s a solution that can work for anyone, no matter how many notes you’re trying to keep on top of.

The Problem With Evernote’s Notebooks

Evernote has three layers to its organizational structure. It’s pretty simple, but you need to understand it to get the most out of the app.

First off are notebooks . These are like “folders”, where you save individual notes.

Next are stacks . These are like parent folders to help better organize your notebooks.

When most people start using Evernote, they fixate on these notebooks and stacks. It’s probably a hangover from organizing your files on Windows in the same way.

But Evernote’s notebooks and stacks have two main problems.

Notebooks can’t be nested. This means your organizational structure can only be one level deep.
In other words, you can have a child folder within a parent folder. But you can’t have a child folder within another child folder.

How To Use Evernote Tags

Second (and most frustrating) is that you can only place each note in one Notebook . If you have a note that’s relevant to two notebooks… tough. You can only choose one .

As your library of notes grows, these problems are almost guaranteed to turn your otherwise organized notes into a complete mess.

Luckily, Evernote has a third organizational tool: tags . You can assign descriptive, searchable tags to each note to help granularly organize your notes.
You can also nest these tags, and assigned several tags to each note. Problem solved.

Fixing Your Notebook Problem If you have a complex system of notebooks, your first challenge is to narrow these down to as few as possible.

Before I reorganized my own account, I had over 40 individual notebooks. Now I have five. You, however, might choose to have only two or three. These new notebooks are simply a way to organize everything extremely broadly. The real organization comes later.

Your Collection Box The most important of your few notebooks should be the initial notebook created for you when you set up your Evernote account. By default, this is named “[Username]’s Notebook”. Rename this to something like “-Inbox” or “-CollectionBox” to make it more descriptive.

Evernote Tags Vs Notebooks

Tip: Placing a symbol like “-” before the notebook name keeps the notebook at the top of your notebook list.

This notebook is where you’ll save pretty much all your new notes by default. When you create a new note through the mobile app, or grab a screenshot with Evernote’s Web Clipper , these should all be dumped into your “CollectionBox”. This saves you the hassle of tagging each and every note as soon as you create it.

Evernote’s New Web Clipper Is The Ultimate Content Saving Tool

Evernote’s Web Clipper isn’t new.

But if you haven’t heard, or perhaps didn’t like the Evernote clipper in the past, this is the right time to look into it again.

Read More

It’s far more productive to batch process that tagging every week (or month). Having all these new notes in a single notebook like this makes tagging quick and simple.

A Limited Number of Other Notebooks You should create any other notebooks sparingly. The more notebooks you create, the longer it will take you to decide where each note belongs. And the harder it’ll be for you to locate notes later on.

Since this new system relies so heavily on tags for organizing notes, notebooks are barely needed. If you take this to the extreme, you could create just one other notebook called “FilingCabinet”.

Tip: Avoid placing spaces in your notebook names and tags. This makes searching a lot easier.

After you tag each note in your “CollectionBox”, just move it over to your “Filing Cabinet”. This way, you’ll always know where you’re up to. And if you have a decent tagging system, it’s easy to keep a huge number of notes organized with just two notebooks. More on this later.

I chose to create a few other notebooks, however.

Ideas — Any notes detailing ideas I want to save, including article ideas, places I’m hoping to travel to, etc.

Personal — Where I store non-work related notes.

Reference — Where saved articles, book notes, screenshots, quotes, PDFs, receipts etc. are stored. Basically, any “knowledge” I might want to find in the future. This is by far my largest notebook.

Work — Where I store any work-related notes.

Your own notebook structure will be different to this, for sure. Just be mindful of creating notebooks sparingly. The more notebooks you have, the harder it is to keep everything organized.

Getting Serious With Tagging As I said, your notebooks should just be the broad foundation of your Evernote structure. The essence of your system should rely on tags .

The unscalable option here is to tag notes with a couple of rough topics, and hope you remember these tags in the future. Good luck with that!

The scalable option (a small sample of my own tags is below) is far more elegant.

Essentially, when tagging each note you want to know a few things about it:

What area it relates to, broadly speaking; preceded by “1”.

What type of content it is; preceded by “2”.

What theme(s) it covers, more specifically; preceded by “3”.

The system I’m advocating does just this. When I tag each note using this system, I know I want to tag these three specific things about it. Each note should have at least one tag that relates to each of these three points. This makes it very easy to sort and find notes on a granular level.

For example, when I review the below highlight from Jack Kerouac’s book On The Road , I can see at a glance that I’ve tagged all three points. This is a personal note (meaning it’s not work related), it’s a book note, and it’s on the topic of life and travel.

Your own individual tagging taxonomy will be different to mine. But a relatively similar structure is an extremely scalable way of organizing your notes. It takes some time to get used to this, but it’ll soon become second nature.

Finding Specific Notes When it comes to finding notes in the future, there are two features that are especially useful: the search bar and saved searches.

When using the search bar, you can search multiple tags to find exactly what you’re looking for. Let’s say you remember saving a note from a conversation you had with a friend about traveling to Brazil. If you tagged this note properly, the following search would pull up that specific conversation.

This is the real beauty of using this kind of tagging system. Searching for a quote about politics? No problem.

Tip: Placing numbers before tags like this helps you to know that you’ve assigned tags for each of the three areas relating to each note. This ensures you cover all angles to help you find the notes in the future.

For searches you find yourself performing routinely, set up a saved search . To do this, set up your search. At the bottom of the search box, you can also add other parameters such as notebooks, tags, keywords, etc.. Below, I’ve set up a saved search for ideas relating to work.

When your search is complete, on Windows click File > Save Search , On Mac click Edit > Find > Save Search , and name your search. From now on, when you click the search box, you’ll see a link to that saved search to pull up the results instantly. You can also drag the saved search over to the shortcuts widget for even easier access.

Automate Where Possible There’s no point spending more time tagging your notes than is necessary. Luckily, you can automate this in a few areas. The main way of doing this is by using the automation platform IFTTT (if this, then that).

You can use IFTTT to connect different services to your Evernote account. You can then tell the platform to save certain kinds of notes to certain notebooks. It can even assign specific tags.

Capture Your Creative Ideas Instantly with the Simplicity of IFTTT

Capture Your Creative Ideas Instantly with the Simplicity of IFTTT

Setting up a central system to track your ideas is worth the time and effort it requires. Your creativity and productivity will thank you for it. Here is a simple way.

Read More

I have this set up to save all my Instagram posts to my Reference notebook, and tag these 1personal, 2instagram, 3travel.

I’m also addicted to reading articles on Instapaper , and take a ton of notes on what I read. It therefore makes sense to have another automation set up that saves all of my Instapaper highlights to my CollectionBox notebook, with the tag “2contentnotes”. This saves me some time when it comes to tagging everything in my CollectionBox each week.

Become an Instapaper Power User With These 6 Cool Features

Despite an impressive adoption rate, a plethora of Instapaper features often remain unexplored. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Read More

To see a more comprehensive list of how else IFTTT can work with Evernote, see here .

Could This Work for You? This method may not seem quite as simple as just dragging and dropping your notes into vague notebooks. But it is far more scalable. In short:

Save pretty much all of your notes to a “CollectionBox” notebook.

Routinely tag each of your notes, using a taxonomy that works for you. This should explain:

1 What the note relates to.

2 What type of content it is.

3 What themes it covers.

Move the note to one of the few notebooks you’ve set up.

Use these tags to find specific notes in the future.

This tagging system (or something like it) can help you locate specific notes in flash. It keeps everything far more organized than most other systems out there. And it stays organized no matter how many notes you have.

How to Organize Your Out-of-Control Reading List Right Now

How to Organize Your Out-of-Control Reading List Right Now

A reading list serves a lot of functions — from practical to inspirational. But it can also get out of hand. Using these tips to manage your reading hobby can do wonders for your life.

Read More

If you decide to go ahead with a system like this, it will take some time to re-organize your Evernote library. But once you’ve got into the routine of tagging your notes like this, you’ll start to realize just how useful Evernote can be.

Is this a system you think could work for you? If not, how come?

Image Credit: Antonio Guillem via Shutterstock.com

LikeThanks!You've already liked this

Evernote has become my personal knowledge base and my go-to place for storing and finding all kinds of information. In this post, I share my secrets on how to organize Evernote.

I used to store notes in Outlook. I had a cork board where I pinned physical paper notes. For storing PDF files and scanned documents, I used Dropbox. The occasional post-it note would float around on my desk until I got time to type it into my Outlook notes. I even had a physical box to store newspaper clippings.

What do all these things have in common? With the exception of the box, where I today store complete newspapers and magazines depicting world events, they are no longer needed. I use Evernote. Today I have more than 1.300 notes in Evernote.

The Evernote concept

Evernote is an application that consists of notes. The notes are organized in notebooks. You can organize the notebooks in stacks, making it easier to navigate between a large number of notebooks without losing the overview.

Evernote is completely platform independent. It runs on your computer, your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It runs on your Android phone and tablet, as well as in your browser. Synchronization is flawless across all platforms and offers off-line access on all of your devices.

Evernote has some limitations. 100.000 notes, and 250 notebooks. A note can only reside in one notebook at a time. Notebooks cannot be nested. The number of tags is limited to 100.000, and you cannot have more than 100 tags in a single note.

It integrates with a ton of apps and services. I use it with Outlook, IFTTT, and Newton. For a complete list, see their App Center. They are currently running a beta with Google Drive, I will for sure have to try this.

Evernote partnered with Moleskine in 2012. The Evernote Moleskine notebook lets you transfer handwritten notes into Evernote using the Evernote app.

How to organize Evernote

There is no right or wrong way to organize Evernote. My advice is that you organize Evernote in the same way you live your life. I have been playing around with different ways to organize Evernote over the years, and I think that my current setup could at least spark some ideas on how to make Evernote work for you.

Evernote is my personal knowledge base

I use Evernote to store all kinds of information, everything from favorite quotes and what I want to do on my next vacation to career plans and blogging ideas.

I said earlier that you should organize Evernote the same way you live and organize your life. What I mean by this is that in life we all have multiple roles and contexts.

If you have a family, then “family” can be a context where you plan vacations. “Home improvement” is the place for all those projects, plus things like the color code on the paint you used in the kitchen. If you have kids then, in your role as a parent, you would have to follow-up on things like “Health”, “Education” and “Activities”.

Most of us have to work. A natural context is then “Work”, with sub-contexts like “Career” and “Pension” On a more personal level “Health and Medical” and “Hobbies” would be common contexts to group information by.

How I organize Evernote

I’m using stacks to group my main categories. I use the notebook titles for subcategories. I always include the stack title at the start of the notebook title, in order to make things sort neatly. Interestingly, I have found that this method of organization has spilled over to my folders on my hard drives and Google Drive. It is just the natural way to store and find information.
This is parts of the outline of my Evernote stacks and notebooks:

DWL /

  • DWL – Blogging
  • DWL – Posts
  • DWL – Posts – Focus Horizons
  • DWL – Posts – Shirt collars

IT /

  • IT – Adobe
  • IT – Adobe – Lightroom
  • IT – Adobe – Photoshop
  • IT – MS Excel
  • IT – MS Windows
  • IT – MS Word
  • IT – Other
  • IT – Social Media

Other /

  • Other – Misc
  • Other – News clippings
  • Other – User manuals
  • Other – Vacations
  • Other – Vacations – Europe
  • Other – Vacations – Europe – UK
  • Other – Vacations – USA
  • Other – Vacations – USA – New York

Personal /

  • Personal – Health
  • Personal – Interest – Drinks
  • Personal – Interest – Education
  • Personal – Interest – Food
  • Personal – Interest – Photo
  • Personal – Interest – Travel

Work /

  • Work – Career
  • Work – Education
  • Work – GTD
  • Work – Leadership

I addition to this, I have a Notebook named “**Inbox” (The ** at the start of the title is to make this Notebook stay at the top of the sorting). This is my standard save-to folder. I also have a Notebook called Reading. More about that later.

[wc_box color=”primary” text_align=”left” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” class=””]

[/wc_box]

How I use Evernote

Save from the web

The Evernote Web Clipper is a browser add-in that enables me to save articles, or parts of articles, from web pages. Before a trip, I will save all my travel documents as PDF files in Evernote. I also have a picture of my passport and drivers license, in case I lose it. Even if I lost all my belongings, I could log on to a computer to find the most important documents.

Gather information and ideas

Before writing a blog post, I will create a notebook for this post and start noting down ideas as well as saving background material that I find online. When I feel that I have enough I will start writing, and sometimes I even do this inside Evernote because of the offline feature.

Share your information and let others contribute at the same time

When planning vacations, I will share a notebook with my wife, letting her comment and add information. This is also a great way for a team to brainstorm ideas without having to meet.

Save emails to Evernote

This function lets me save an email from the Outlook desktop client to Evernote. The Outlook 365 add-in also shows related information from Evernote.

Evernote Delete Tag

Offline reading

My notebook called Reading is available offline on all my computers, my tablet, and my phone. This enables me to save those long articles and read them later, even if I have no WIFI connection.

Tagging

Evernote is very search friendly, I find it mostly unnecessary to tag my notes. The only exception is for those keywords that are not in the text.

The key to succeeding with Evernote

From time to time I meet people that tell me they have tried Evernote but could not get it to work. The most common error they have been doing is to use Evernote as just another place to add stuff. They do not take advantage of Evernote’s versatility, and they do not organize their notes in any particular order.

If you have trouble finding stuff in your desk drawer due to lack of oversight and organization, you cannot expect to solve the problem by adding just another drawer. In fact, what you are doing is to multiply the number of places something might be.

The key is to take full advantage of Evernote and consolidate your stuff in fewer places. Evernote’s ability to search in notes and attached files, combined with the ability to organize notes, notebooks, and stacks according to your needs, makes it a very powerful tool.

Tags

Evernote and Getting Things Done

Evernote Nested Tags Html

I use Evernote for what’s called reference information in GTD. This is my “one trusted system” as David Allen likes to say, for generic reference material.

Evernote Tag Hierarchy

Some people are running their entire GTD system in Evernote alone. To be honest, I cannot see why you would want to do that when you have tools like Todoist around. If you would like to try to use Evernote that way, David Allen has an official guide for how to get started.

[wc_box color=”primary” text_align=”left” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” class=””]

[/wc_box]

Should you upgrade?

Evernote’s free Basic plan is a good start, but it has its limits. To get the most out of Evernote, I would recommend upgrading. The Basic plan only syncs between two devices. This is not enough for most people today.

Nested Tags Evernote Ios

On a general note, I would recommend paying for Evernote for the sole reason that you are supporting a great company, making sure that this awesome product is here to stay.

If you upgrade to the Plus plan, you can sync across all your units, and you will have offline access to all your notes. At this level, you can add notes via email and get support.

If you choose the Premium plan, PDF files and Office documents are searchable. You can view the history of your notes, as well as related notes. This means that any Google search will also show results from your Evernote account. These features are the reason why I chose the Premium plan.

Why wait? Sign up for Evernote now.

Disclosure: By using the above link, I will get three months free Evernote Premium if you sign up for the Evernote Premium plan. Please trust me when I say that I do not get paid for product reviews, and will never promote products that I have not tried myself.