I like your example with the "misc" tag. I also used to do something similar, except instead of misc tag I just didn't add any tags at all and then searched for notes without tags and looked at similarities to tag/group them with.
However when you really think about it - what's the purpose and outcomes of this?
Why do we want to organize things in the first place?
There are different purposes, e.g. with mind mapping, outlining - we use those tools mostly to understand things and etc. rather than to just find them later and while Evernote could also be used for brainstorming/outlining - it's not really what it's designed for.
In case of Evernote we usually organize things to find them later.
Now I think there are basically 2 main ways to find things - searching and browsing... Both are useful in different cases.
Tags/keywords are generally flat (even though nesting is possible, it's limited in usefulness and it limits you to organize tags in only a single way, more on that later) and are most useful for searching.
But sometimes you don't know what you're looking for and discovering what you want is at least as important as finding what you know you want.
So basically whenever we organize things in Evernote - we organize them for 2 reasons - to find them later by searching and/or by browsing.
But here is a interesting realization - whenever you use just tags to organize notes with the purpose of finding them later by browsing you're going to inevitably run into problems! I think one of the main reasons people want to organize notes with tags is to define some categories and then to browse those categories and to discover what they want, i.e. to discover things when they don't really know what they're looking for... in those cases searching is useless since you don't even know what to search for. When we do not know exactly what we are looking for, it is much easier to be able to broaden and narrow our area of interest with some categories than to perform some sort of random walk from idea to idea.
Now you can say that you can organize notes into categories with tags and then browse those tags and find notes by browsing - so what's the problem? You can even nest tags into hierarchies which is supposed to solve the problem of having a lot of tags, right? In practice though it still doesn't work.
Yeah, there is navigation possibility. But it's limited and also it's unhelpful most of the time, especially when you have a lot of tags/categories to browse through which is what you're going to end with anyway unless you just avoid tags/categories (which is also not helpful and doesn't solve the problem when you want to find information by browsing).
The problem with using tags as categories is that there's no way to conveniently organize tags themselves in multiple ways.
It is a problem because every time you organize matters in one way, you are disordering them in others.
Sure, any note can have multiple tags but if you use tags as categories then eventually you would want to organize those categories with parent child relationships as well, i.e. tags and sub-tags.
Otherwise browsing flat tag list is just as helpful as browsing flat notes list. The list itself becomes useless.
So this is why some people tend to avoid/limit tags I guess.
Nesting tags into hierarchies is limited and not helpful because every time you organize matters in one way, you are disordering them in others. It's similar to tagging a note with only a single tag so you have to make a decision about what is the most important attribute of the note. This is a limitation of a physical world though and it has no place in a digital world.
Btw on a side note - there is no one single most important thing in reality at all, everything could be the most important thing, it really depends on the context. For example at this moment when I'm writing this post - it is the most important thing in my life - but after that I'll move on to something else which would become the most important thing.
It's silly when people say that something is the most important thing in their life, e.g. even health or money and whatever. Everything is important, what's the most important thing really depends on the context...
But back to the topic...
Yep, it's impossible to organize everything in every possible way... No one person or group is going to be able to organize it in all the useful ways, hanging all the leaves on all the branches where they might be hung.
but we do still get value from organizing things.
The solution is to give up control.
Things have their places, not a single place. Doesn't matter if they're not in all of their places. The more ways you can find a relevant note the better. Link/group things whenever it's appropriate and helpful, don't attempt to interlink/group everything in every possible way.
Heck even amazon.com or wikipedia doesn't organize everything in all the useful ways but they still have categories and those categories are still very useful. You just don't want to rely on one thing only, i.e. either browsing with links/categories or searching for exact keywords. You want to do both. The more ways to find stuff the better but there is no best/ultimate way to organize everything.
This is how you solve the scalability issue, basically just give up control and perfectionism.
Evernote is good mostly for one way of information retrival - search. Browsing is possible and in fact everything could be done with some imagination.
But it's not possible in Evernote to organize things to find them later by browsing. unless you use workarounds. (which I do use and will write about them later, but in short - it's about using notes to organize tags and tags to organize notes, i.e. using both notes and tags as data and metadata depending on the context, this gives unlimited flexibility and makes it possible to avoid tags limitations).
Each note's data, whether it be a photo, a pdf, an audio note or text, is only retrievable if we remember enough about it in order to find it again. The paradox I see is that while Evernote 'remembers everything', we do not, but we do need to remember *something* in order to retrieve *everything*. With a large number of notes, as EN encourages, there is no way of browsing the entire list to find a particular note. Therefore, we need to remember enough about the note required that we can provide a search term, tag or date range that yields an manageably browsable search result to fill the gap between what we remembered and what we want to find.
"Each note's data, whether it be a photo, a pdf, an audio note or text, is only retrievable if we remember enough about it in order to find it again."
It's true but since metadata is infinite we always remember "something" about anything...
The problem is when you search for "something" that is a only part of the note itself. This is a problem because you might not remember anything from the note itself.
But If you add metadata to the note, i.e. define all the possible categories/topics (you could think of) it relates to and then also organize those topics into broader and narower topics then it's pretty much impossible to not find anything. It's really just a matter of time then.
"manageably browsable search result to fill the gap between what we remembered and what we want to find."
This really nails it in my view, especially when you consider that a search result could also tell you what you might want to search for additionally. In other words the search doesn't have to be for the note exactly, you could search for the information about the note, i.e. its category/metadata and then use this metadata to find the note itself. But to do this you have to use notes to define categories/metadata instead of and/or as well as tags, (this is just based on Evernote design though) this is what I'm experimenting with at the moment.
Might sound confusing but in practice it's actually not, the only confusing thing is when you try to define what a tag is and what a note is because there is no one ultimate way to define what is what, i.e. it depends on who you ask and when..
I think it's still a fairly new thing for most people to try and capture all meaningful information in their life so we're all pioneers in this in a way.
