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(Archived) Need some advice on organizing, tags and folders


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I have been using Evernote for a while now. But I haven't used tags. I need some advice on whether I would benefit from them........

Back story: I am a pressure vessel inspector and I use Evernote to take down my notes and track each piece of equipment that I am involved with ie repairs, to do, etc.

Right now I have a notebook called Equipment. Then each piece of equipment gets its own note. For example:

Equipment:

090-T-31

071-T-15

Each time I add a note to a piece of equipment ,I put the date and time entered and the proceed with the text. See attached files. I figured out how to incorporate a todo list within the note (using the check box and saved search function). I would like to be able to also add them in different categories. For example, Some pieces of equipment need repairs. So it would also be combined in a repairs folder, or tag or whatever.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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Tags are awesome because you can add more than one tag to any note.

 

In your case, each piece of equipment has its own single note, which you periodically append with new entries by date. You also wish to categorize each piece of equipment in perhaps more than one category. It makes perfect sense to use tags.

 

I had previously been using a number of notebooks in addition to tags. I've recently (as in, since yesterday!) reorganized my Evernote, moving all 1500+ notes into a single notebook, most (but not all) of which have at least one tag associated with it, and many of them with multiple tags. I've already found it much easier to work with, especially when creating a new note.

 

Notebooks become really helpful if and when you want to share a group of notes with someone else, like with a team at work. In Evernote, you can share individual notes, or notebooks, but you can't share a group of notes tied together under a tag.

 

The problem with notebooks, for many, is that a note can only be in one notebook. Often, when creating a note, I had to decide which notebook to put the note in, and that took time. And when the note could go in more than one notebook, I'd put it in neither! I'd just put it in the default folder and then attach multiple tags, so I had some notes in a notebook, and some notes in another notebook but with the tag. It just seemed illogical, so I got rid of all the notebooks, just use tags, it makes entering a note much faster now, and it more seamlessly brings together all notes in whatever categories and associations as I require. 

 

This similar approach is one of my favourite features of gmail. Old email used "folders" (notebooks), and you had to decide into which folder to put an email. Gmail uses tags, and allows me to just dump all emails into one single "archive", once I've attached whatever tag(s) I need to categorize the email. 

 

One thing - give some thought to how many tags you may want to manage, and try to limit that number. The more tags, the less manageable it is. Remember also that searching your Evernote is fast and powerful, and saved searching is recommended by many.

 

Hope this helps. Let us know how you make out.

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