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(Archived) 4 Kids, 1 House, 1 Dog, 2 Cars, Multiple Chaos


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Ok...my wife and I started using Evernote a year ago to keep track of receipts, and tax records...yawn. Now that she just gave birth to twins and our life chaos has increased exponentially, we again turned to Evernote to find a solution.

I have read getmegeeky's evernote for mom's ebook and though I have read it 3 or 4 times, I don't get it. In the spreadsheet example, the kids and family are listed with red subtopics (notebooks), but in actuality, you cannot duplicate a notebook name so I don't know how to accomplish that. Plus, that didn't really translate to the templates at the end of the book. So, that left me confused and searching for other advice.

I have read so many blogs, searched high and low and I don't know how to set this up for our use and to minimize the chaos.

With 4 kids, we cannot set up each kid as a stack because the subtopics of medical informaiton, artwork, sports, etc cannot be duplicated for each kid.

Conversely, stacks for Medical Information, School, Sports, etc can't be used because we can't put the kids' names in each stack due to duplication?

So, then I think about tags. Each kid (and us) is his/her own tag. So, with notebooks for Schoolwork, Medical Information, we can tag with the kids' names and that will separate them.

But, each kid is important enough for his/her own tag...arghh..so confused.

Any advice from those with multiple kids? How can I best organize this database? We are drowning in paper and the chaos is beating us.

Thanks in advance....

-buried in St. Louis

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I keep records (medical/dental/vision) for my husband & me & my mom. I do keep my mom's in her own notebook - one for everything - medical/dental/vision). I keep one notebook for my husband & I for everything (medical/dental/vision.) Then I tag by person & type, IE Joe, me, Mother & medical, dental, vision. Or you could kind of combo them like "Joe - medical", "Joe - vision", "Mother - dental". This is how I do everything including cars. All the car info goes into one notebook & gets tagged by car.

I use very descriptive titles of my notes (IE YYYYMMDD - Joe - Dr. Banner - followup). But if a lot of visits & notes pertain to the same issue/condition, I'll add a tag for that, too. IE, "Mother - hospital March 2012". That makes it easier to quickly find all the notes/scans/info for that one issue/condition.

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+1 for descriptive titles - don't forget that Evernote will index the content of your notes so you don't need to restate the subject; title the note with something you can search on to bring a set of notes together - like YYYYMMDD - homework - James. The important thing is to choose something simple that you can apply consistently - too many notebooks and tags means you'll lose track of what keyword goes with which topic.

Have confidence in the search function, and concentrate on getting your documents scanned and saved - but keep an eye out for stray documents whenever you do a search, and change the title or the tags on any that pop up in the wrong places. This sort of 'gardening' is a pretty constant feature of my database but I guess it should settle down.. someday.

And slightly off topic - don't forget that while you can use Evernote to kill all (or most of) the paper, you can also use it to save pictures and sound recordings at birthdays, concerts and so on...

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