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Search: AKA the Lack of Hierarchal Folders


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I'm new to Evernotes.  SOHO for Macintosh has served me faithfully for years,  but my acquisition of a Chromebook sent me looking for a x-platform program, and pretty quickly I found the complaints centered around note organization in Evernote. While SOHO has a folder hierarchy that will cause note migration to be a chore, I have to say that Evernote's search based system is nothing to fear and is a giant step forward if done with some thought ahead of time.

 

Consider this:

Lets say each note has 3 keywords out of a possible 10. Then a note can have 720 possible key combinations, and if the keys were chosen wisely so that each combination holds about the same number of notes, 10 notes per key combo allows 7200 notes. Since year is built in, this allows 7200 new notes a year. That should satisfy just about everybody.

 

So the real trick here is to choose the 10 keywords wisely, before the first note is written.

I start my search for keys with the concepts what, where, why, how in front of me, and then I scanned my SOHO notes for patterns. So far I have:

Personal

Business

Writing

Enviro

Car

$

 

I'm taking my time to pick my other 4 keys.

And by the way, note grouping is still very easy. I have notes keyed to Enviro that have a common header Emissions. One note is titled 

Emissions:CARB:Prius and keyed to Enviro and Car.

 

Having trouble thinking in broad categories for keys ? Take a peek at Roget's Thesaurus for some inspiration.

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Seems like a good approach. I am up to something like ~140 tags after 6+ years of pretty constant use, but most of the growth has come from creating tags that relate to specific things like travel destinations, or areas of software development. It's hard to say that I use most of those with any frequency; there really is a fairly small core at the heart of things. I usually have counselled taking it slow with tagging and other organizational approaches in Evernote, and find one that works well for you. 

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Seems like a good approach. I am up to something like ~140 tags after 6+ years of pretty constant use, but most of the growth has come from creating tags that relate to specific things like travel destinations, or areas of software development. It's hard to say that I use most of those with any frequency; there really is a fairly small core at the heart of things. I usually have counselled taking it slow with tagging and other organizational approaches in Evernote, and find one that works well for you. 

Google, and most importantly Gmail, taught me to appreciate just how great search can be for personal use.

Then one day I was watching my wife scroll through her thousands of photos and I realized that we don't really need to find one specific item from the get go, or even a specific folder; the trick is to trim the mountain of items down to something manageable like 30 items, because then we can pluck out the item of interest with ease.

 

To my way of thinking, I'm not so much looking for my item of interest with a key search, I'm excluding all the stuff  I  clearly don't want :)

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  • Level 5*

Indeed -- of all of the software around, I see Evernote as being closest to GMail in terms of search and organization (though I'd really like some of the rules-based stuff like GMail's filters in Evernote). I generally aim for somewhat less than 30 items, more like 10 or fewer, maybe because of the Seven Plus or Minus Two "rule"

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Hi Eric,

Welcome to the Forum! It sounds like you're off to a great start. Far more organized than most of us when we first started! If you do get curious about how other folks like to organize their Evernote databases, run a few Forum Searches using keywords/phrases like:

* Tags, or Tagging

* Tags versus Notebooks

* Organizing, or Organization, or Organizing Evernote, etc.

There's also a lot of great How To articles in the Evernote Knowledge Base (KB), including a "Getting Started Guide" for every Client (device specific apps).

Though reading your post, I have doubts you'll be needing much help at all! I suspect you could teach many of us non-power users a few things before you've been at it a week.

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Jefito and wordsgood, thank you for the comments and the warm welcome.

 

Alas, not a day old and I already have something to whine about. Actually, I knew about my nit before I wrote my first note but decided to adopt Evernote anyway.

I just don't like mice very much. Taking my hands off the keyboard to click something slows me down and makes any application feel clunky to me. I know x-platform apps suffer from mouse syndrome in no small part because they cross platforms, but it sure would be nice if Evernote adopted even a subset of Gmail shortcuts.

 

'/' to enter the search box, anyone ?

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