Organizing Travel Documents with Evernote?

[blackcows 9]

I am a long time EN user and have gotten to the point of being about 99% paperless in my life.  The more I have used EN the more I have understood the power of the search feature and for that reason I have been able to consolidate what was once 40 plus notebooks into about 10.

 

I am trying to come up with a method to organize my travel documents....flight conformations, rental cars, hotel, etc.  To this point what I have done is to make a new folder, for instance 140410 LA, which would be my folder for LA trip on April 10th.  This works ok but does involve adding and deleting a lot of notebooks and as I said I have gotten to the point that I have a minimal number of notebooks.   The other thing I dislike is that I prefer my travel info to be available offline so I can look at it on an airplane and with the current method I must always remember to go into my iPhone and iPad setting and add those folders as offline folders.

 

Any suggestions on how to simplify this?  I know I could dump all of my docs in a single "Travel" notebook but that gets disorganized very quickly.

 

Is there a way to make a notebook stack offline?  For instance if I set up "Travel" and then stack trips underneath can I make sure they are always offline without doing this each time I set up a new notebook in the stack?

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

I organize my travel in Evernote as well and encounter some of the same challenges that you do. All I can do is suggest what I do, which may or may not jive with you or your preferences. 

 

Avoid additional notebooks

- Create a tag for a given trip. Rather than using a notebook for 140410LA, simply use that tag on anything to do with that trip. This way, for the most part (an exception will be described below), ALL of your trips live in a single travel notebook, but can be differentiated by tag. (140410LA; 131204NYC; etc.) 

 

- The added benefit of using tags instead of notebooks is that if you happen to have meeting notes related to this trip in a different notebook, or restaurant recommendations you clipped from the web stored in some other notebook, you can slap this tag on those without moving them from their original notebook. This makes it easier to find those notes without actually having to move them. 

 

Make Available Offline

- The trouble with having all of your travel documents in a single notebook is that making that notebook available offline eats up a lot of space. this is why, just before your departure, you search tag:140410LA to bring up all of the associated notes, and plop them into a new notebook that contains ONLY those notes. You will then set this notebook to be offline on your mobile device. This means the download will be quicker and will occupy less space on your device. 

- One slight variation is to create a notebook called TravelOFF or something to that effect which is always set to be OFFLINE on your mobile device. You just move your 140410LA notes into that notebook before your departure, and remove them when your trip is over. Leaving the TravelOFF notebook in place but empty until your next trip, and leaving it available OFFLINE. This way your avoiding having to toggle online/offline all the time. 

 

Just some ideas. 

[blackcows 9]

Thanks for the reply.  I do like the idea of having a different notebook which is always setup to sync offline into which I can dump my documents right before I travel.  I thought about using tags but I don't like the fact that you have to search to find the info, for me I prefer to open a notebook and have it all there.

 

Thanks again, the extra notebook idea gets me closer to what I would like to do.  It will still involve adding and deleting folders but that will not be much trouble.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Indeed having to search a big dumping ground for a tag can be a bit... awkward or... messy, but there are some ways around that. For example, you could set up saved searches and add them to your shortcuts, which may be temporary, such as a saved search for your april trip. You'll be doing a lot with that saved search from the time you start booking things until the time you return from your trip. Then you can delete the saved search. 

 

The other thing you can use is the tag filter for the travel notebook:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s25/sh/6855e752-4fa4-4c15-9d66-94e5de262cf2/c09a9eacef45d1e7af3240a8e82151db

Granted, that can get somewhat cumbersome when the number of trips increases....

[Wordsgood 526]

The other thing you can use is the tag filter for the travel notebook:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s25/sh/6855e752-4fa4-4c15-9d66-94e5de262cf2/c09a9eacef45d1e7af3240a8e82151db

Granted, that can get somewhat cumbersome when the number of trips increases....

Hey, I didn't know about that function, so thank you, Scott!

[s2sailor 2,261]

I tend to use very few notebooks and tags.  Instead I use note links.  I will have one main itinerary note for each trip.  In that note each day is a separate bullet and for each day there are sub bullets with the details for that day.  Each detail bullet is typically a note link to another note such as plane or hotel confirmation, directions etc ... That way, this one note gives me a good overview of the trip itinerary and then the note links will take me to the various details as needed.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

s2sailor, that is a great suggestion. I frequently forget about using note links/table of content notes in this way.