(Archived) Feature Request: information aging.

[poepping 0]

I would like to be able to mark an item for "review" or "deletion" after a certain amount of time.

use case 1 : a todo list. In a month, the stuff on the list is completely useless, and only confuses searching. when creating the list, set the retention to 1 month, and at the end of the month, move it to a "to delete' folder, which can be manually, or automatically cleaned up.

use case 2: a daily action. If every day you write down a word of a day from somewhere, that note should be able to pop up a reminder telling you to update that note.

use case 3: you call someone and take a note of the conversation, but need to call back at a later date to gather further information on a subject. You attach the date on the current note, and at that time, the reminder will pop up telling you to review your data.

use case 4: you place a X month timer on all data, and have the data reviewed every X months to make sure it is still valid and relevant. This would allow you to purge useless data, and also update notes with more current information if something had changed.

There is too much data out there that is completely worthless (probably about 99% of it) this feature would help keep on top of the pile of data to make sure you only have relevant data and you don't up just lugging around ***** that slows down searching for relevant information.

Also when I say that evernote should pop-up something to remind you, this would probably be better if it went to a folder of notes that needed attention, as I have evernote running on 3 different device, and I don't need pop-ups on just one (missing it), or pop-up on all of them (annoying)

[engberg 89]

There's no built-in feature in the UI to do this, but you could simulate it pretty easily using an advanced Saved Search.

First, put a unique string in each note that you can search for (e.g. "toreview"), or use a unique tag for the same purpose.

Then, you can search for all of the notes that are at least one month old by typing this into the search box:

-created:month

If you combine these two into a search and then Save it, you can find all of the notes with your special text/tag that are at least one month old like this:

toreview -created:month

(or, if you used a tag)

tag:toreview -created:month

You can construct this search in the web or mac UI and save it directly. On the Windows client, you need to type this query in. We plan to add direct save searching in the future on Windows.

[tennr 0]

To collect recent notes, I use the exact technique suggested by Dave. This has been very helpful for generating weekly and monthly progress reports.

The OP's use case #3 requires entry of future dates. The "Subject Date" field could hold that date, but it does not appear to be accessible on all platforms (I typically use Mac, iPhone, and Web). Is there a way to enter future dates and create a saved search that finds all notes within a future time period, for example, next week? If not, is support for the subject date and this type of search planned for upcoming releases of Evernote (across all platforms)?

Tom

[engberg 89]

You can search for subject dates with the same syntax, so this would find notes that have a subject date after 2009:

subjectDate:20100101

And this would show notes created before 2008:

-subjectDate:20080101

[bignote 0]

I would like to be able to mark an item for "review" or "deletion" after a certain amount of time.

use case 1 : a todo list. In a month, the stuff on the list is completely useless, and only confuses searching. when creating the list, set the retention to 1 month, and at the end of the month, move it to a "to delete' folder, which can be manually, or automatically cleaned up.

use case 2: a daily action. If every day you write down a word of a day from somewhere, that note should be able to pop up a reminder telling you to update that note.

use case 3: you call someone and take a note of the conversation, but need to call back at a later date to gather further information on a subject. You attach the date on the current note, and at that time, the reminder will pop up telling you to review your data.

use case 4: you place a X month timer on all data, and have the data reviewed every X months to make sure it is still valid and relevant. This would allow you to purge useless data, and also update notes with more current information if something had changed.

There is too much data out there that is completely worthless (probably about 99% of it) this feature would help keep on top of the pile of data to make sure you only have relevant data and you don't up just lugging around ***** that slows down searching for relevant information.

Also when I say that evernote should pop-up something to remind you, this would probably be better if it went to a folder of notes that needed attention, as I have evernote running on 3 different device, and I don't need pop-ups on just one (missing it), or pop-up on all of them (annoying)

This is a very important issue.

After some time, lots of notes become obsolete or useless. It's a tedious task to go through all notes one-by-one. For now, I have a category named "Future Deletions" and mark all notes that I'm sure will become obsolete like much of the examples quoted above. In many cases upon note creation, I know I can mark it as "Future Deletions" and do so. Afterwards, every now-and-then, I review all notes in this category and delete when I think it's time to do so. There are many notes that are good for a specific time range. Why gather useless clutter that hinders software performance...? It's important to keep our databases clean of obsolete material. It would be nice to have advanced delete features such as:

> have a specific built-in category for junk named something like the one mentioned above "Future Deletions" and so when we right-click on that category, there would be an option to "delete all notes in this category". That's like one-click maintenance.

> activate an auto-delete feature for newly created notes (old ones too) so that as I create the new note, I can assign a sort of "timer" such as 30 days or 60 days, and so on... this way, the note is immediately marked for deletion and when the time is up, the auto-delete does the job. At some point, I was using an email application (eMailaya) that had this auto-delete function. You could choose the amount of days till deletion. That eliminated obsolete emails (junk). The same thing can be applied for notes...

> on some notes... if I am not sure what amount of days to select for the auto-delete, then I mark it as "Future Deletions", This is an alternative selection.

Currently, in Evernote, there is no way to do any form of maintenance.

[guilap 0]

bignote, it appears to me that this would add unnecessary complexity in the software. You can do most of the tasks using a tag and selecting all notes (7 secs maximum) or sorting by date, selecting the first note do delete, hold SHFT, press END and delete (20 secs or less in Windows client). Just my opinion...