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(Archived) How to Organize?


regnart

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I love Evernote but I've come across a problem or two. I'm trying to limit the amount of services/places I store information, and evernote is great for that. I've put more and more stuff into it, except it's very hard to figure out how to categorize things so that I can find them easily. Some people keep evernote just for cooking and taxes, I'm a creative person so my categories are more varied and less strict. For example my big main catergories are art, projects, school, personal, blogging, food, code, music, research, and work. Some of them overlap (like art/projects/work). Tags don't really seem to help. I can never seem to decide WHERE to put stuff. I've heard about GTD and organizing systems like that but none seem suited to me. Does anybody have any tips?

 

My other big problem is images. I have a lot of images and there isn't an easy way to resize them so I tend to use up my monthly limit, which wouldn't be much of a problem as I just spread it out through the month, except I exceed the note limit. Making a note for each image would make things even worse and harder to find. I've tried a few third party resizing programs but none save the images correctly. Only photoshop does, but that's a chore. Are there any faster ones? Or does anyone have a different solution? The markup with skitch was great (though they've taken it out in the last version) but the resize option wasn't there.

 

I've thought about just linking to local folders... but then things wouldn't be synced. Another solution I was considering was saving the images on google drive and syncing to those. I'd link the original images but the links often break.

 

I just hope maybe hearing some ways others keep their stuff organized will help me.

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  • Level 5*

You're a creative person; this is where creativity comes in. Tags are a set of words, adjectives, nouns, maybe verbs. The components of a language. You don't need tags for every concept; you can use multiple tags to describe things that fit into different categories. Flip side: a tag needs not have a single meaning (just like words); they gain expressive power in conjunction with other tags and literal text that might appear in your notes. If things overlap in real life, then the tags can and probably should express that. Using tags in conjunction narrows your search space.

Don't worry about putting stuff anywhere; put your effort into describing it. Don't worry about organizing your tags; put them in the first place that seems reasonable, then forget about them (I keep the tag panel closed almost all of the time), except: remember the tags that you use.

Use notebooks sparingly, only when you must. You must use notebooks to keep local notes in the desktop clients. You must use notebooks to share sets of notes. You must use notebooks to cache sets of notes for offline use in the mobile clients.

Don't worry about GTD. That's a system for managing tasks. It sounds like you need a way to organize your information.

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Like yourself, I am using Evernote extensively for all my work and information gathering. I also capture alot of photos and to help cut down the size of each photo, i create a table with say, 3 columns. By trial & error, you can adjust the length fro 100% to 85%. Once you load the pictures in each column, you will find the picture is adjust accordingly. if you want smaller picture, just add more columns. It will 'force' the picto be reduced.

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Like yourself, I am using Evernote extensively for all my work and information gathering. I also capture alot of photos and to help cut down the size of each photo, i create a table with say, 3 columns. By trial & error, you can adjust the length fro 100% to 85%. Once you load the pictures in each column, you will find the picture is adjust accordingly. if you want smaller picture, just add more columns. It will 'force' the picto be reduced.

That doesn't actually reduce the size of the picture, it just appears to shrink it. The pictures are still the same size.

 

You're a creative person; this is where creativity comes in. Tags are a set of words, adjectives, nouns, maybe verbs. The components of a language. You don't need tags for every concept; you can use multiple tags to describe things that fit into different categories. Flip side: a tag needs not have a single meaning (just like words); they gain expressive power in conjunction with other tags and literal text that might appear in your notes. If things overlap in real life, then the tags can and probably should express that. Using tags in conjunction narrows your search space.

Don't worry about putting stuff anywhere; put your effort into describing it. Don't worry about organizing your tags; put them in the first place that seems reasonable, then forget about them (I keep the tag panel closed almost all of the time), except: remember the tags that you use.

Use notebooks sparingly, only when you must. You must use notebooks to keep local notes in the desktop clients. You must use notebooks to share sets of notes. You must use notebooks to cache sets of notes for offline use in the mobile clients.

Don't worry about GTD. That's a system for managing tasks. It sounds like you need a way to organize your information.

I've tried the tag method but I end up making up too many catergories and the just leaving notes in a giant pile and doesn't work for me. I'm a bit OCD about organizing, if there's a notebook/tag i must have mental rules about what goes into it. For example, I keep a lot of artistic references and tutorials. Right now I have them divided into categories (anatomy, environments, etc) with a note assigned to each. Say I were to leave each individual picture in it's own seperate note as I clipped it (insteda of combining them). I'd have to tag each, find out how to describe it. If I was looking for x picture I'd have to click through each note (I don't like the thumbnail view as it takes up too much space). Then the tags would be a mess. Imagine:

Anatomy

   human

     hands

     feet

     etc

and so on... There's too many possibilities. Using tags instead of notebooks leads me to branch them out like crazy.

But my way, which sort of works for me, doesn't go well with evernote because each note has a limit. I don't mind shrinking the images (I can easily search for a larger size on google) but there's no easy way to do this. One option I thought would be to store them in a local notebook but the notes their still have a limit. I was looking up organizational methods and that's were I found GTD but as you say, it's more task oriented. I haven't found much else though. So either I need a way to bypass this or some sort of simple organization method that helps me put things into categories.

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  • Level 5

As Jeff said above, use notebooks sparingly (many power-users have only one notebook) and less tags may be better than too many.

It really pays off to think about a tag structure first. And yes, less tags is usually better than too many. You can also re-organize your tag structure later.

Try to describe the content of your notes in the note header (title). Don't be afraid to use several words. That way you can find your notes even without tags.

Good luck.

Wern

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Have you tried Lightroom? I have started to keep a contact sheet of my photo shootings in Evernote, just for reference, and resizing with Lightroom works perfectly. You can also set jpg quality, which helps keep the balance between file size and image quality.

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  • Level 5*

I understand about hierarchies, and tags must be stored in a hierarchy in Evernote, but that doesn't mean that they need to be used that way, and that's a good thing, because life isn't naturally hierarchical. Frankly, all knowledge, your relationships, things and everything else cannot be described using a hierarchy. Think about the task of organizing the internet. Back in the day, there was Yahoo, and it presented a hierarchical view of the web. It was hard to use, and you just couldn't find what you were looking for. And then Google came along, and took away the need for a hierarchical organization: you just describe what you're looking for, and you're probably going to find it. Tags and text search give you the opportunity to do something similar in Evernote. Text search can go a long way towards that (some folks don't use tags at all, imagine that); tags can give you a loose structure that helps to narrow the search space, on your terms.

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Think about how you are going to look for things and make tags or notebooks that will help you find them. BTW Evernote search is very good; some people rely primarily on search to find things, but I like tags to keep notes together with other related notes. Index notes are another useful trick.

 

I use a few notebooks to organize things into areas: school, projects, reference, action, etc. I use a lot of tags, but not exactly in a hierarchy. 

 

I have some action tags: #shop, #errand, #followup, #xmas etc. When I'm shopping or running errands I check everything tagged with that tag. 

 

I use other tags for projects-in-process. For example, I tag anything I'm planning for school with #sch.desk and have a shortcut for that in the sidebar so I can quickly see what's on my "desk." I have other "desk" tags for projects; this helps me quickly find my notes and any supporting info for something I'm working on. When I'm done, I just delete the tag. You can do this from the tags screen or by selecting a group of notes and editing the tags as a group. 

 

I have a tag: #orders, for anything I've ordered online. This was especially useful before xmas when I was expecting a lot of packages. Throughout the year, I tagged gift ideas, recipes, itineraries and notes with "xmas." When I got ready to shop and plan for the holidays, all my notes were right there. 

 

I have a "!today" tag to group anything I need to look at today. I use reminders to bring up notes on a particular date, and then add the !today tag if it belongs on my daily agenda. 

 

You could use a notebook as a "desk" for grouping in-progress stuff, but I prefer to file notes in the notebook where they will ultimately be archived (school, projects, etc) so when I remove the tag, they are already where they belong. 

 

BTW I use # before a tag if it's one I use a lot, so it stays at the top of the tags list. This is just a personal quirk. 

 

I am heavily into knitting and other crafts; I download a lot of patterns, tagging them "sweater" or "hat" etc. and have recently started tagging them "worsted" or "bulky" for the kind of yarn used. If I'm looking for a sweater pattern that uses bulky yarn, I can do a double-tag search and find them all. 

 

For school, I use a different organization scheme. I have a note for each week where I type in my lesson plans with links to any materials I'll need. I title each note by subject and unit: eng12.shak.macb. When I am ready to plan for MacBeth, I can browse the notes alphabetically in my School folder. (I also have tagged these notes "macbeth" and "eng12" which is really redundant, but when I started I was using titles and only later came to see the usefulness of tags.)

 

It would be nice to figure things out before you do a lot of tagging or titling, but I find that my methods are continually evolving, and I've accepted this. One of the best things about Evernote is that it accommodates almost any organizational scheme I want to use. I don't see any disadvantage to having a lot of tags; periodically I go through and delete some of the less useful ones. I do see some disadvantages to having a lot of notebooks, in that it may be hard for me to remember where I put things. Then, again, the search function is so robust that it's hard to lose things. 

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  • 9 months later...
Posted · Hidden by jefito, October 7, 2014 - spam - not evernote related
Hidden by jefito, October 7, 2014 - spam - not evernote related

To best manage and organize your current photos and future additions you have to go for the online data backup solution. If you are saving your data in SD cards or your pc storage then it might be risky. Do not compromise with your data security because your data can be easily lost due to machine errors, theft, breakouts or any other reason. So I usually store my photos and videos in the online cloud storage. I am currently using Free CloudBacko. I can access CloudBacko from Windows, Linux, Mac etc. I can store upto maximum 100TB of data free of charge.

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