(Archived) ? on Tag strategy; and search on Tag

[Lite1 2]

Newbie learning to understand EN, and arrive at my preliminary approach to use. Plan to minimize Notebooks and use Tags instead as my primary organization approach and means for retrieval.

Searching:

1) It seems that you can NOT search for a match to a portion of a Tag name. The only partial Tag search one can do is that the Tag must start in a certain manner, but can be followed by any other characters. This is done by tag:xxx*

 

2) Can you use the "any" operator when searching using    tag:   and if so, please give a couple of examples of the proper syntax and what it would find.

 

Tags:

I am considering a tag structure all at one level (no nesting) that would be like this. My questions are really about the usefulness (or lack of it) for numbering Tags; the particular choice for the Clusters of Tags below is just an example ...

00PERSONAL

01skills

02health

03motivators

04inspiration

10WORK

11xclient

12yclient

12project

20FAMILY

21spouse

22daughter

23son

30HOME

31project

32dreams

33time savers

40FINANCES

41investments

42retirement plan

43taxes

50RENEWAL

51creativity

52travel

53hobby

60READING

61productivity

62pleasure

63health

70ARCHIVE

etc.

 

Ok, you get the idea. The cluster starts at a new numeric ten-spot and is in CAPS. For clusters that might be quite populated 3 digit prefix would keep it within that cluster. Would memorize only the 10 cluster (life focus) areas and when entering a Tag for a new Note by simply typing "6" EN would show me all of the choices in the READING cluster, and arrow keys if needed could navigate deeper into that cluster from the dropdown. 

3 This seems to be how it functions in Windows desktop app, would it behave similarly in other clients?

 

4) It'd seem that a search    tag:6*   would bring up any Note tagged with something within the 6? cluster
tag:6* tag:0*    should bring up Notes that were tagged both with something from Reading cluster and from Personal cluster - Is that right?

 

5) It seems that a drawback to nested tags is that Parent tag name does NOT appear. If I have nested Tags of Michael  under a Parent Tag Work clients      and a nested Tag Michael under a Parent Tag Family     things would get very confusing.  While my tentative approach avoids this, it looses ability to collapse Tags, but to me that seems like a small price. What am I not understanding about Nested Tags? What are some of their advantages?  It seems that if you use Ctrl+Alt+T to get at and assign Tags to an existing note, that you only see the child-tag without the context of its Parent; to me it'd be a lot better if EN used approach like Quicken to show Parent:child when it displays Tag.

 

Thanks for any of your thoughts and helping to cut my learning curve further.

[jefito 5,598]

1) It seems that you can NOT search for a match to a portion of a Tag name. The only partial Tag search one can do is that the Tag must start in a certain manner, but can be followed by any other characters. This is done by tag:xxx*

Correct.

 

2) Can you use the "any" operator when searching using    tag:   and if so, please give a couple of examples of the proper syntax and what it would find.

Yes: "any: tag:tag1 tag:tag2" would find any notes tagged with either tag1 or tag2 (or both)

I am considering a tag structure all at one level (no nesting) that would be like this. My questions are really about the usefulness (or lack of it) for numbering Tags; the particular choice for the Clusters of Tags below is just an example ...

If it works for you, then it works.

 

Ok, you get the idea. The cluster starts at a new numeric ten-spot and is in CAPS. For clusters that might be quite populated 3 digit prefix would keep it within that cluster. Would memorize only the 10 cluster (life focus) areas and when entering a Tag for a new Note by simply typing "6" EN would show me all of the choices in the READING cluster, and arrow keys if needed could navigate deeper into that cluster from the dropdown. 

3 This seems to be how it functions in Windows desktop app, would it behave similarly in other clients?

Should do.

 

4) It'd seem that a search    tag:6*   would bring up any Note tagged with something within the 6? cluster

tag:6* tag:0*    should bring up Notes that were tagged both with something from Reading cluster and from Personal cluster - Is that right?

Yes, it should for both examples.

 

5) It seems that a drawback to nested tags is that Parent tag name does NOT appear. If I have nested Tags of Michael  under a Parent Tag Work clients      and a nested Tag Michael under a Parent Tag Family     things would get very confusing.  While my tentative approach avoids this, it looses ability to collapse Tags, but to me that seems like a small price. What am I not understanding about Nested Tags? What are some of their advantages?  It seems that if you use Ctrl+Alt+T to get at and assign Tags to an existing note, that you only see the child-tag without the context of its Parent; to me it'd be a lot better if EN used approach like Quicken to show Parent:child when it displays Tag.

Tag nesting is really for organizational purposes, but nesting does not affect search. There is forum discussion on how to make use of nesting in search, but that's just feature requests. The main reason for nesting is so that you don't have to paw down a single dimensional list of 200 or more tags.

[jbenson2 2,149]

Interesting concept.

Your system reminds me of a software program I bought several years ago.

I liked the idea of 200 pre-built electronic folders set up by experts. Numbered and very structured.
http://www.org-matters.com/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx

But eventually I switched to Evernote due to the more flexible format and stronger search capability.

In my opinion, the long list of numbered-tags will require require either:

1.) a lot of tedious scrolling as more notes (and tags) are added or

2.) an astounding memory
 

[Lite1 2]

Thank you both, very helpful.  Jbenson2 - don't have an extraordinary memory and would plan to only memorize what I am calling Clusters which would start at 00   or 10   or 20 etc. To simply enter a Tag for a Note I'd just type the first number e.g. 2 and then look at the case sensitive drop down menu to choose the most relevant one. Not sure it would work as well for search, but wonder if (even if a Note is well tagged) a simple search on "words" that should be in the Note if it has the kind of information that you want would be the more likely way to search. The Tag searches could be added to that but generally in the more generic approach e.g.   search might be    website proposal Adams tag:2*  to simply isolate the hits to anything that must use at least one Work-Cluster tag.

 

I guess I am realizing that perhaps I really should be thinking about what kind of information retrieval I am likely to be doing, and then ask myself whether the Title and/or the "body text" of the Note is likely to be sufficient to be able to retrieve it? If the answer is yes, then the question is whether adding any kind of tagging is worth the effort. I think that if I need to find one specific Note then "body text" search should be sufficient. If I am doing research on an area, and want all Notes that might be relevant to Solar and Home and DIY, then having tagged notes would get me the results as the "body text" of some relevant notes might not have those (tags) as words in the text. Does that make sense?

 

At this point I only have about 50 notes most of which are various test notes to just play with things so I am thinking about Search and Tagging a bit in the abstract which is a handicap.

Again thanks to members for their helpful input.

[jbenson2 2,149]

Using the Evernote search grammar can pull up a lot of information.

 

Here is an interview of one of the Forum users - Grumpy Monkey.

 

He discusses his minimalist approach to using Evernote. You might find some nuggets here.

http://www.degconsulting.net/2012/03/how-a-phd-student-uses-evernote-to-organize-his-life-with-one-notebook.html

[Lite1 2]

Thx jbenson2 ... I had actually read that article earlier today, and while I like his idea of having a standard content as part of each Note (yymmdd keyword keyword keyword) I am not sure I buy into his suggestion of making it the beginning of the Title field. He also attributes his approach to the following, and I do not agree that that is how I (or perhaps most people encode our memories):

"Christopher argues that we naturally remember things chronologically. The idea comes from Noguchi Yukio‘s filing system.  The theory being that you stuff everything from one day into an envelope and place the date and title of the contents on the outside of that envelope, and then stick it on your bookshelf. Since the belief is that we remember things by the date rather than by an artificial classification system (read: tags or notebooks), we’re more likely to find the information quickly by remembering “when” we made the note."

 

Many years ago when I was doing NLP training (Neuro Lingusitc Programming - a methodology for personal change or being a change agent for others) we were asked as participants to ask in small groups several different stem questions and to simply note the way in which they were answered:

Think of someone who is very important in your life ...

How did you meet them?

Some people would consistently answer the "How" question that started with a "where" answer. I met X at a ski resort ... rather than I saw X and liked the way he was skiing and approached him on the chair lift line to ask some ?s.

 

For some people if you do the same thing but ask ... When did you meet X? the answer starts with where   or vice versa.  We found that some people have a very strong tendency to verbalize their answer starting with Where and then perhaps going to What and then to When.  Others might strongly lead with When ...

 

Regardless, personally I was not wowed by the interview, although some of what I have read of Grumpy Monkey's posts has been very helpful. I think I probably missed what he was getting at, other than the general thing of the value of keeping your system (and workflow) for organizing things as simple as possible as that is likely to have payoff. I had actually thought about starting a thread to discuss the article that you sight as I expect it'd be an interesting thread.

[jefito 5,598]

Different people have different ways of mentally categorizing and organizing their stuff. I find that a little experimentation with the tag system will go further in helping you to discover what works for you, rather than trying to design a grand plan based on someone else's system.