Is there really any reason to use month/year tagging if you are diligent about note creation dates?

[MTHF 1]

I see a lot of Evernote organization tips and guides using tags for year and month to tag notes. Is there any reason that this is preferable to just making sure new scanned documents and notes have an accurate Creation Date before filing the note away from your Inbox?

[gazumped 12,043]

Hi.  The guiding principle for Evernote use (IMHO) is "whatever works for you" - if you're happy with your process,  just ignore the advice.  I don't use either method;  my note titles contain the date of meetings / letters etc so I can use an intitle:<date> search.  I don't use many tags at all.  The "whatever works" thing also has the advantage that if you're following a prescribed process invented by someone else,  you will, inevitably,  mess up from time to time.  Do what feels natural and you're more likely to be consistent in its application.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

"whatever works for you indeed"

Unlike the date-taggers, and the date-in-title folk like gazumped, I generally try and use the Date Created to reflect the actual relevant date for that note just as you suggest. 

Sometimes, if I am making a series of notes over time, I might informally include the date in the title just for quick reference, but not systematically. The Date Created is either automatically accurate (because the date created is the actual date I want), or I modify it if it needs to be shifted a day or two back (in the event it takes me a while to get it into Evernote). 

 

There are advantages to all the strategies. The things I like about the Date Created field (though these are not necessarily all exclusive to this strategy) include:

1. Sortable in most of the views, not just list-view
2. Does not add length to titles, or push the content of the title further down (that is, the title itself is the first part of the title, rather than the date, which doesn't indicate the actual note content). 
3. Easily searchable as a dedicated piece of metadata (tags can do this too nicely, but the title strategy can get muddy with searching)
4. Automatically generated upon note creation and does note require any conscious thought (unlike title or tag, which requires you to note the date, remember how you want to format the date, and then also not induce a typo). 

That being said, the Title strategy has the advantage of being infinitely portable. Of all of the metadata contained in a note, if you ever needed to migrate your content out of Evernote, you are guaranteed your note title will make it through the migration unscathed.... the rest of the metadata, while it will probably make it through just fine, may not. 

 

There is also the possibility that you could convert between strategies. The note title one is the hardest to migrate to. However, migrating to tags or to date created is pretty easy. It isn't too hard to search for or sort notes by date and add a mass tag, for example. These may be scriptable too. 

[rbianchi 66]

MTHF,

Take into account that if you export the notes in .ENEX format, and later you import the notes, then the created date of all notes are reset to the date when you import them.

[CalS 5,307]

Not so sure the create date changes when you import an ENEX file....

[Frank.dg 1,385]

[MTHF 1]

I really appreciate the helpful responses, guys, thank you!

[rbianchi 66]

Ok, my mistake...

I do the test, and the created dates ramains, but I believe that in previous versions that did not happen.

 

Also, see the comments to this post:

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/85306-my-creation-dates-have-been-reset/#entry362690

 

Frank.dg

That options box does not exist in Mac OS.

[CalS 5,307]

@rbianchi, stuff happens.

 

@MTHF, you are welcome.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

I see a lot of Evernote organization tips and guides using tags for year and month to tag notes. Is there any reason that this is preferable to just making sure new scanned documents and notes have an accurate Creation Date before filing the note away from your Inbox?

i title almost everything with yyyymmdd and keywords. it provides useful options for my use case.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=367

if you want to go bare-bones minimalist, you can eschew titles and tags entirely, and just rely on carefully crafted saved sarches to organize your notes. whatever works for you,