Features to Remember Everything

[NewHero 58]

I think the key selling point of Evernote is still 'Remember Everything'. I love the new editor, Tasks and other features. But there have been apps with a better editor for years. What kept me in Evernote was the fact that I just never felt like I could dump my entire life into these other tools as well. The features below will help Evernote continue to be the only real app for organizing and remembering everything, are inspired by Legacy, and need to be taken much further than legacy ever did (or could, given technological constraints).

• Mass edit for tags: Tags are special because they allow you to make deeply nested hierarchies (clean, tidy) and apply tags from various hierarchies to a note (introducing complexity). In Legacy Evernote, you can multi-select tags and move them around quite easily. That feature could be easily restored and we should go further. It should be very easy to define complex tag hierarchies, because that is the secret sauce that actually helps Evernote users remembering everything.
• Create with tags/Tags as notebooks, not filters. In Legacy, when you select a tag, it's not like applying a filter. It's more like configuring an environment - just like selecting a notebook. You can choose a notebook and some tags, and then as long as that environment is selected, every new note you create while brainstorming, reading or researching will include that environment. You don't have to then manually go back and tag everything. Tags should be more like notebooks than filters, because all other filters are intrinsic in the content and don't need to be added by the user. Tags need to be added, so restoring this feature from legacy would make it much easier to create lots of new notes which are organised neatly by default.
• Saved Search. Saved Search was always my favourite Evernote feature, and I don't think even legacy did it justice. Now that we have more powerful filters and tasks, saved search should be pushed even more to the front. I would like to see Saved Search have it's own section in the sidebar / home screen. Because it is the final level of abstraction that allows you to organise everything - you choose your notebooks (stack), your tags and your filters and then you give it all a name. I would love a pretty GUI for exploring your saved searches, much more than just adding them under Shortcuts. I would like to be able to give a description to each Saved Search, and explore the search parameters easily.
• Search Aware Tasks. By linking tasks to a specific saved search, you can bundle all relevant information together with a specific action statement. The new tasks are so amazing and I really love them. I want them to be linked back to the 'Remember Everything' agenda.

I hope these can be seen as a singular 'feature set' related to one main goal of Evernote - helping you remember everything. Tags are the most powerful features of Evernote, so I should be able to manipulate them en masse (at least a multi-select) and I should be able to create notes 'in' tags, like notebooks. Saved searches help you organize your tags (and other filters), so we should really push a nice GUI for viewing them, as the primary portal into all of your stuff.

I should be able to do this:

- Select notebook: Research.

- Select tags: Family > Daughter, Medical > Allergies, Cooking

- Pick up my phone, call people, read a book and browse the net and just keep adding more notes into this environment for an hour.

By the end of it, I have an entire collection of information which I don't have to go back and tag manually. I can create a nice Saved Search called "Ally's Food Requirements" which might include information from other complex tags and queries.

Then I can create a task like "Send Ally's Food Requirements to friends Parents" and attach my saved search so that when I get around to doing it, it's all there.

I still think Evernote is the only app which ever really understood that organising hundreds and hundreds of notes is more important than even have a few very beautiful notes. I think the features above will help it do that in a way that the competition can't keep up with. Tags are not filters - they are way more powerful and even more powerful than notebooks. As a first step, restoring feature and concept parity with Legacy tags will go a long way in making it easier to organise everything.

[Mike P 2,624]

5 hours ago, NewHero said:

Create with tags/Tags as notebooks, not filters.

I'm not really sure what you want that isn't already available

• If you filter your notes using tags and then hit "New" the new note created inherits the tags.
• If you are in a notebook and hit "New" the new note is created in that notebook.
• If you are in a notebook and filter that notebook by tags and then create a new note the new note is created in that notebook with the tags.

The only problem I can see is that if you filter by notebook and tags (ie the notebook name is a blue lozenge rather than a notebook name at the top) the new note inherits the the tags but is created in the default notebook. Pictorially:

Hitting New in this configuration creates a new note in the notebook AllMyNotes and with the two tags $pinned and bootstrap

Hitting New in this configuration creates a new note in the default notebook with the two tags $pinned and bootstrap

I can see the logic of this but the distinction between "being in a notebook" and "being in all notes and filtering by notebook" is subtle and returns exactly the same results.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

@NewHero, this is a great, well-thought-out set of suggestions. Some may already be possible, as @Mike P suggests, but overall I love it as a conception of what Evernote is capable of. I'm not sure that simply posting here is enough to bring them to Evernote developers' attention, though, since the forums are user-to-user and we can't really predict when Evernote staff will pass through or what they'll notice. There are feedback options within the apps (including the Web app), and that might be the way to go, though I don't know whether they would accommodate something this comprehensive.

[eric99 978]

4 hours ago, Mike P said:

I'm not really sure what you want that isn't already available

• If you filter your notes using tags and then hit "New" the new note created inherits the tags.

Yeah but the tag filters are cleared after the note creation, the context is set back to the full note list. So you can't create multiple notes in that tag context. I don't see the logic. This is different from notebooks where the notebook stays selected until you clear it explicitly. Tags are always promoted as a good alternative for notebooks, which isn't the case due to this counterintuitive behavior.

edit: as work around you could restore the tag context by navigating back ( alt ←  )  after the note creation

[Mike P 2,624]

57 minutes ago, eric99 said:

Yeah but the tag filters are cleared after the note creation, the context is set back to the full note list. So you can't create multiple notes in that tag context.

Good point and great work around.

[NewHero 58]

On 10/15/2022 at 6:44 PM, eric99 said:

Yeah but the tag filters are cleared after the note creation, the context is set back to the full note list. So you can't create multiple notes in that tag context. I don't see the logic. This is different from notebooks where the notebook stays selected until you clear it explicitly. Tags are always promoted as a good alternative for notebooks, which isn't the case due to this counterintuitive behavior.

edit: as work around you could restore the tag context by navigating back ( alt ←  )  after the note creation

Yeah this was the issue I had as well.

I just really like the old workflow. Tags felt 'heavier' to me somehow, and more real. There were tags and notebooks, and then things like having or not having checkboxes was just a search query/filter.

All that being said, I think I need to really explore the new features. I am dramatically under using Tasks, for example. I hope they can restore my beloved tags, but I'm still quite ready to move forward with the new direction and amend my workflows.

[PinkElephant 8,072]

Tags are alive and kicking. By introducing nested tags on mobile one of the largest inconsistencies for me has finally been removed by v10 innovation.

What is missing for me:

• The chance to reduce the number of hits based on a first (2nd, 3rd, ...) tag selection
• The legacy tags page, for a monthly review of tag usage and weeding out the tag undergrowth