(Archived) good folder and tagging structure????

[noteit 0]

anyone able to provide any good folder and tagging structures???? i've got a good list going and before i spend anymore time trying to figure out the best way to access and archive info i am looking for ideas.

[totaljoe 0]

Of course everyone's needs will be different with this sort of thing. I tend to keep my organization system in Evernote on the simple side as to avoid wasting too much time deciding where notes should go.

I have found a sweet spot at the moment having just two distinct notebooks. One is a default notebook where I keep everything that is not a receipt or a bill. This one gets used and looked at on a daily basis. My Receipts and bills and such get archived off in a separate folder called "Receipts." This way they are out of the way and don't clutter up the default notebook. Then I have a public notebook which I haven't found much use for yet, but it's there nonetheless. My personal philosophy with tags is to keep the number of them manageable and to not nest them. I keep around 10, and I delete tags I'm not using anymore. I don't like to spend too much time tagging and I don't like guessing later at how I may have tagged a particular note.

I'm not saying any of this is good or bad. It's just how one person uses folders and tags in Evernote.

[noteit 0]

thanks that's what i've settled on more or less

i use a 'new' and 'old' folder and that's it (the old is just the archive)

i use tags from there, and that's it.

the only feature that is lacking is a good way to make a to do with a way to sort by date and also work both ways on the iphone

with that things would close to perfect!

[crispinb 8]

For what it's worth (which may not be much, as I'm still experimenting), I have 4 superordinate tag categories. "Content" contains tags that loosely describe the note's content, eg 'psychology', 'neuroscience', 'computer', etc). "Note type" contains tags like "bibliographic note", "question", and "quote". "Rating" has three tags (1, 2, 3), whose semantics vary according to what I tag -- eg. when attached to a note that has a checkbox, they represent the importance of the implied 'todo'. "Resource type" has tags like "filesystem", "web" etc (this isn't equivalent to the 'source' attribute, as I mean it to represent not where the note was clipped from, but what kind of resource it points to). At a minimum, each note has one or more content tags, and one note type tag.

Captured notes go into a default 'Inbox' notebook until processed (tagged or deleted), when they get shifted into my main notebook.

This is what I use for my miscellaneous randomly captured notes, and works well for me. I have however a problem with my project-based, self-generated notes. These really are a natural fit for a recursive hierarchical structure, and I haven't figured out an optimal adaption of Evernote's flat tagging scheme to them yet. Currently I use one notebook per project, and a hierarchical set of tags for each notebook. But it's a bit error-prone and clumsy. In particular, I need to segregate the notes into their own notebook because I want to be sure they'll stay together (and not depend on remembering to correctly tag them according to some relatively complex tagging scheme). But that rules out associating any of my miscellaneous existing notes from my main notebook with a project, which is limiting.

[missdipsy 2]

I use a kind of syntax with my tags, which works pretty well, although it's still "in development" so I might end up changing it slightly

All "action" tags get an exclamation mark in front of them, e.g. "!read/review", "!email"; and exclamation marks are also used to indicate priority for action items: !!!=high priority, !!=medium, !=low. This means that when I'm tagging something that I know I need to act on, I type an exclamation mark and a list of all of my "action" tags pops up. This means I'm less likely to accidentally tag something incorrectly and completely forget to act on it (and it doesn't rely on me remembering all of my tags accurately) , and even if I do accidentally mis-tag, as long as it's got an exclamation mark it'll still be marked for "action" and therefore will be looked at again!

My main areas of responsibility or major projects mostly have their own notebooks, but those which don't (either because there is a lot of overlap between the notes relevant to that project and notes relevant to other things, or just because there aren't enough notes yet to justify a whole notebook) get an asterix as a prefix, e.g. "*househunting" (although I'm thinking about promoting this to it's own notebook soon), and "*kids" (which doesn't have it's own notebook as too many of my notes tagged "*kids" also fit into other categories).

I'm still working on the rest of it, but I have some ideas about other ways of categorising things. Other than that I make use of nesting to organise my other tags, which are mostly ways of categorising the type of information the notes contain or what they relate to (e.g. "tips", "inspiration", "interesting", "food", "computer", "holiday", "days out", "DIY") - basically everything that isn't a major project or a description of the kind of action I need to take on something.

One of the reasons I use the combination of exclamation marks and asterixes is that that is the syntax for emailing things into the task manager I use (Toodledo), so it helps to be consistent. I think the key is to make it easier to remember whatever system you choose. Once you've got a lot of tags it can be hard to remember all of them, and you start to get inconsistent with how you tag things, so all of the most important tags (i.e. those associated with actions that should be taken and major projects) should be easy to remember. Prefixing with symbols works really well since those tags sort to the top of the tags list in Evernote and when you type the symbol in the web clipper all of the tags beginning with that symbol pop up, which reduces the reliance on remembering all of your tags off by heart.

Obviously the system you choose depends a great deal on the way your mind works and the way you use Evernote, but I can definitely recommend using prefixes for tags.

[missdipsy 2]

I forgot to mention, I'm starting to introduce a numerical "rating" system too, similar to crispinb's. I've been using this system in delicious (where I still keep most of my bookmarks, since it's more suited to bookmarking sites that change. I use Evernote for "bookmarking" pages that are more static), where I've used the ratings for things like rating campsites for a recent camping holiday, and rating the houses I'm interested in on a property website.

Delicious is another place I use the same syntax, and many of the same tags, as Evernote. As I said, using the same tagging system in as many places as possible helps to keep things consistent and reduces errors through forgetting your tags.

[audiologic 0]

missdipsy,

could you expand a bit on how you are managing the export of evernote into toodledo? I've just begun doing the same thing, and was thinking about if there was a way to select the toodledo folder by inserting the syntax into the note. any pointers you have would be helpful.

I'm also noticing that my toodledo tasks that came from evernote are unreadable except for the subject line, because of the embedded html. how do you manage this?

FYI, I'm using the iphone evernote client to send emails. also using the ToDo.app to synchronize toodledo on the iphone.

Thanks in advance

I use a kind of syntax with my tags, which works pretty well, although it's still "in development" so I might end up changing it slightly

All "action" tags get an exclamation mark in front of them, e.g. "!read/review", "!email"; and exclamation marks are also used to indicate priority for action items: !!!=high priority, !!=medium, !=low. This means that when I'm tagging something that I know I need to act on, I type an exclamation mark and a list of all of my "action" tags pops up. This means I'm less likely to accidentally tag something incorrectly and completely forget to act on it (and it doesn't rely on me remembering all of my tags accurately) , and even if I do accidentally mis-tag, as long as it's got an exclamation mark it'll still be marked for "action" and therefore will be looked at again!

My main areas of responsibility or major projects mostly have their own notebooks, but those which don't (either because there is a lot of overlap between the notes relevant to that project and notes relevant to other things, or just because there aren't enough notes yet to justify a whole notebook) get an asterix as a prefix, e.g. "*househunting" (although I'm thinking about promoting this to it's own notebook soon), and "*kids" (which doesn't have it's own notebook as too many of my notes tagged "*kids" also fit into other categories).

I'm still working on the rest of it, but I have some ideas about other ways of categorising things. Other than that I make use of nesting to organise my other tags, which are mostly ways of categorising the type of information the notes contain or what they relate to (e.g. "tips", "inspiration", "interesting", "food", "computer", "holiday", "days out", "DIY") - basically everything that isn't a major project or a description of the kind of action I need to take on something.

One of the reasons I use the combination of exclamation marks and asterixes is that that is the syntax for emailing things into the task manager I use (Toodledo), so it helps to be consistent. I think the key is to make it easier to remember whatever system you choose. Once you've got a lot of tags it can be hard to remember all of them, and you start to get inconsistent with how you tag things, so all of the most important tags (i.e. those associated with actions that should be taken and major projects) should be easy to remember. Prefixing with symbols works really well since those tags sort to the top of the tags list in Evernote and when you type the symbol in the web clipper all of the tags beginning with that symbol pop up, which reduces the reliance on remembering all of your tags off by heart.

Obviously the system you choose depends a great deal on the way your mind works and the way you use Evernote, but I can definitely recommend using prefixes for tags.

[missdipsy 2]

missdipsy,

could you expand a bit on how you are managing the export of evernote into toodledo? I've just begun doing the same thing, and was thinking about if there was a way to select the toodledo folder by inserting the syntax into the note. any pointers you have would be helpful.

I'm also noticing that my toodledo tasks that came from evernote are unreadable except for the subject line, because of the embedded html. how do you manage this?

FYI, I'm using the iphone evernote client to send emails. also using the ToDo.app to synchronize toodledo on the iphone.

Thanks in advance

Sorry, I realise I may not have been entirely clear in my original post; I wasn't talking about exporting things from Evernote to Toodledo (although I do sometimes email things to Toodledo from Evernote as a quick way to add them), I'm just using the same syntax to organise the information I keep in several different systems as a means of making it logical & easier for me to remember.

Emailing from Evernote to Toodledo works in exactly the way you describe: The note title becomes the task title, all other fields are blank and the note is all html. I don't think it's entirely useless though, especially if your Evernote notes have good titles, since it is a quick way to create a todo that is related to one of your notes. It'd be much better if the html at least contained a link back to the note in Evernote Web or something, wouldn't it? That way it wouldn't matter too much if the note is mostly unreadable in Toodledo as you could click on the link to view the original. However, in webclippings there is generally a link back to the source website contained within the html (near the top of the "body" section) so you can click on that to view the original site you clipped from, which is a bit more useful. Of course, lots of the text of the is still readable in the html, but it doesn't look pretty and is buried right down at the bottom of the html amongst a jumble of html tags so it's far from ideal.

I wonder if it's worth submitting a feature request to the Evernote developers to ask if we could have editable subject fields in the emails? That way we could at least add the Toodledo syntax and get it to the right place in Toodledo. Various other webapps use a similar system to email items into them, so it would probably be useful to many other Evernote users (not to mention the fact that sometimes we just might want to change the subject of the email to make it more self-explanatory to the recipient when sending a normal email from Evernote).

I also wonder how receptive the Toodledo developer would be to the idea of allowing more html in the notes field? Some html is already recognised, such as links & basic text formatting, so they might be prepared to add a little bit more, although I guess there's a limit to how much html it would support before it changes the nature of Toodledo too much (and it becomes something more like Evernote!! :shock: ). The other alternative might be for Toodledo to give us the option to strip all unsupported html tages from notes, leaving us with just text, links & basic formatting.

Perhaps a more fruitful route would be to ask Evernote to give us an option to send plain text emails?For the time being, I suppose a temporary workaround could be to click "send link" in your browser to email just the note title & a link to Toodledo, since this gives you the option to edit the subject line and it gives you a link in Toodledo back to the note in Evernote.

[audiologic 0]

in another thread, I requested the ability to send plain text emails... Perhaps you could post in that thread as well so that the developers take note of their user's interest in that feature?