Take and Organize Lecture Notes with Evernote

[TroyC 24]

I recently provided most of these tips to my niece who was trying to structure Evernote to meet her needs in college.  I thought I'd share here.

 

Assumptions:

1. You have less than 10 courses at one time
2. You have more than lecture notes you need to keep track of (e.g. research items, projects)
3. You need to put more than just text in your notes

Step 1.  Create notebook stacks for each of your courses.  This will allow you to have separate notebooks for things like lecture notes, projects, research, etc.  With less than 10 courses, this shouldn't get unwieldy and will minimize searching around.  

 

Step 2.  Create a consistent naming convention for notebooks within each stack.  For example lectures, research projects, experiments, test prep.  This will help separate the many notes from a research project from your lecture notes.  It will also facilitate sharing projects with a team without sharing more than you want.   Add a title or number for the course to these titles for archiving later (e,g, Psych 1 - Lecture Notes).

 

Step 3.  Create templates for the different types of notes you take (e.g. lecture-note template)

 

Step 4.  Make use of 3rd party software that hooks into Evernote to make your life easier.

• Drafts and Text Expander work on iOS and make text entry in Evernote faster and easier
• Evernote's Camera, Recorder, Skitch and Web Clipper make capture of photos, documents, whiteboards, audio notes, drawings and web content a breeze.
• IFTTT.com allows you to connect Evernote to many services,even allowing you to schedule your note template to appear just before your lecture begins based on Google Calendar.
• TaskClone allows you to track all the todos you think of while the professor is talking which makes sure you don't forget a homework assignment or other task mentioned during the lecture.

Step 5. Archive at the end of course. Place your notebooks in a new stack (e.g. Education Archive)

 

More resources

• 10 productivity tools to take your Evernote relationship to the next level
• Going Paperless - blog of Evernote Paperless Ambassador

[Olli 11]

Hi Troy,

 

thank you for this dense description. That's very usefull for everyone who want's to start with EN - not only for students :-)

 

Kind regards,

 

Olli

[GrumpyMonkey 4,314]

This is great advice, thanks!

[TroyC 24]

Thanks for the kind words.  I also just added a link for creating template notes - Step 3. 

[GrumpyMonkey 4,314]

By the way, I think we suggest a similar kind of workflow for students. Personally, I don't use multiple notebooks in my own account, but I do find them useful for sharing. 

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=1724

[Candid 167]

I might suggest revising Step 5, the archival part.

 

Since Evernote does have a notebook cap, I would go to each notebook at the end of the semester and select all the notes and tag them with an archival tag something like "Class Name Date" Maybe include the professor's name.

 

Then I would move all the notes from all the notebooks to an archive notebook for the school or maybe for the overall experience.

 

Then delete the subject specific notebooks. 

 

This would clear out the notebooks and while you maybe no where near the notebook cap level now, when you do reach the cap it will be a lot more of a pain to come up with good tags for some of your notebooks and move them than it is now when they are fresh in your mind. 

[GrumpyMonkey 4,314]

I might suggest revising Step 5, the archival part.

Since Evernote does have a notebook cap, I would go to each notebook at the end of the semester and select all the notes and tag them with an archival tag something like "Class Name Date" Maybe include the professor's name.

Then I would move all the notes from all the notebooks to an archive notebook for the school or maybe for the overall experience.

Then delete the subject specific notebooks.

This would clear out the notebooks and while you maybe no where near the notebook cap level now, when you do reach the cap it will be a lot more of a pain to come up with good tags for some of your notebooks and move them than it is now when they are fresh in your mind.

Yep. In my workflow (see the link above) I archive the contents in step #7, but don't specify how. Usually, I tell people to archive the notebook, because most people seem more comfortable using them, but I don't archive the content as a notebook myself. I use random reference codes appended to the end of each note (time-consuming to apply en-masse, but useful if you might be moving the content out of evernote someday) and/or tags.