Tips for Organizing/Cleanup

[Ryq G 27]

There are those who are organized by nature.  I am not one of them.

I have 4k notes.  SOME are labeled well and SOME are in the correct Notebook/Stack. I have many duplicates and many blank notes.  Some would be better if I could combine them.

I have created notesbooks named "2bsortedrecipes" and "2bsortedfinancial" that represent equivalent stacks.  I try to take items from my In box and move them there so I can then decide which notebook in my Recipes or Financial Stacks they  belong.

I go through my inbox and try to select as many items that will fit in the target stack  (Command-clicks) first then move them.  I can't get too many before I have to start over again because of an error, so it's not often a great way.  But once I do, I'm "IN" the new notebook.  I have to go back to the IN box again and scroll down the list of hundreds of  notes to get back to the list.  I may find blank notes or duplicates.

What's the best way to do as much as possible within one view/process?

Can I "scroll" through a Notebook keeping track of where I am, as I select and move multiple Notes?  Can I "scroll" through a notebook editing names or deleting notes and stay in the same place?

Each time I start, I get ten minutes into it make little progress.  It's a big job.  I may not explained this as well as I can.  And the answer could be perfectly obvious. For now, I would appreciate a focus on fixing all these old notes before I look at "doing it right the first time."

Thanks for your help.  I know some things are completely obvious and intuitive to some that are not to others.

[DTLow 5,736]

20 minutes ago, Ryq G said:

Tips for Organizing/Cleanup

I'm not a fan of organizing with notebooks; I have minimal notebooks 
My preference is to use the the tag feature (tags 2bsortedrecipes" and "2bsortedfinancial")
I don't use the tag hierarchy; instead structure is reflected in the tagname - for example !Budget-HousingUtilities
My taglist is organized in advance - I don't often create tags on the fly 

I'm not moving notes to notebooks; just assigning tags    
My note list remains unchanged during this process

[gazumped 11,661]

1 hour ago, Ryq G said:

What's the best way to do as much as possible within one view/process?

IMHO there isn't a way to do this "within one view / process".  My background is in managing big databases (long story - that's the very short version) and in all my experiences,  managing the database was an ongoing process - variously called "curating",  "gardening" or "tinkering" depending on your preference. 

After more than a dozen years with Evernote I have 55K notes and a 30GB database and I too have finally -in the last two years- found my 'ideal' structure.  All my new notes are going into that structure,  but my existing ones are initially staying where they are,  because Evernote's search feature is more than sufficient to find them if I need the history.

As an example I've had several bank accounts over the years,  and for reasons of basic security have -mostly- kept correspondence in Local Notebooks - the offline ones that Evernote no longer support.  I still use Evernote Legacy (Windows and Android) so that's not an immediate issue;  but new statements and correspondence are going into specific individual (still offline) notebooks so that I can extract them in case of need. 

Searching my account for the appropriate individual account numbers showed me that I had saved some items into the wrong notebooks by error or omission.  So I've searched all my account numbers and moved all the notes into their new correct(ed) notebooks.  As I deal with my general day-to-day mail and contacts,  I'll do s similar tidy up job on individual connections.  I've been doing that for a year now,  and of my 55K notes,  just 21K are still unsorted and in the default notebook.

The rest are distributed between about 300 notebooks - one for each contact,  contract and project that I have - with an average of 100 or so notes in each,  the low numbers being my aim.  It's far less mind-blowing to see a list of 100 notes than 55,000 notes in one huge pile,  and if I want to see the latest emails on my Acme project,  I just need to open that notebook and sort the notes into created date order.

I'm not expecting to finish my curation tasks anytime soon - that's just a part of business as usual.  But with my curated notes,  plus the occasional search it's much easier to find things now. 

Succession planning is my secondary aim - while I know how all my stuff is 'organised',  family,  or anyone else I might get to help me,  would need some clearer guidelines to help maintain and use my stuff in future.

[sch01ar 48]

9 hours ago, Ryq G said:

Each time I start, I get ten minutes into it make little progress.  It's a big job. 

Don't worry! Ten minutes everyday tidying the shed and leaving it ready to use - even if the shed isn't as tidy as you'd like - is better than an hour dragging everything out and leaving things in a muddle. I feel what works best is to always aim for the minimum structure you can get away with to do what you need to do.

There's been a debate over organisation around folders (in EN; notebooks and stacks) and tags almost since the very first item was indented in the very first outliner. @DTLow is a noted "taggist"; but here I think he is right. Using search to find notes when you need them is more useful and much less stressful than creating and maintaining an elaborate hierarchical notebook structure. You can then tag those notes, save the search, etc, as and when you need to.

[PinkElephant 8,094]

@Ryq G My question is: Do you want to have it neat, or effective ?

Example financials: Let us say you have an insurance. A contract, a yearly invoice, a yearly statement.

You can create a deep structure now, Financial - Insurance - Life - ThatGreedyCompany - Year, and store it away. Do the same for every insurance.

A ton of work, over and again. Why ? To be able to find something, just in case. Because most of the time, you file it away and will never ever go searching. The time for filing is wasted.

My approach in EN is this: I drop it in a notebook, say „Financials“. I may apply tags like year, insurance, contract / invoice/ status. I don’t tag for anything that can clearly be found in all documents, like the company name. 

When I need something, I type the name of the company, maybe set a tag filter, hit enter, and EN magic: the document shows up, maybe among a handful of other search hits.

My experience is that there is no need with EN to invest in setting it all up in nice little drawers. A few large heaps plus some tags to help filter is all it takes.

[CalS 5,280]

I guess first question would be why have an inbox notebook and 2bsorted notebooks.  Make the decision once while in the inbox.  Perhaps with more frequency if you are getting 100s of notes in the inbox.

If you are getting frustrated do it one note at a time and stop when you get tired.  Or only group notes based upon those visible on the screen.  Less chance to have an oops in the process.

The key thing is to get caught up and when that happens to stay caught up.  I use an inbox as well and my objective is to have it be empty by days end.  And anything I send to EN from my email I use the notebook and tagging capabilities to bypass the inbox.  That is I make the decision in email as to where to put the note in EN.

In my set up I have 56,000 notes in 5 notebooks of record.  I use tags (about 450) or text search to find things.  And what I use EN for is to FIND things.  Getting stuff in is the necessary evil.  Whichever method depends upon your own use case.  Mine is predominantly paperless and my version of GTD.  Just about everything gets dumped into EN.  YMMV.