(Archived) Many Notebooks or one and Many Tags?

[thingstocome 0]

Hi Everyone,

I am going to be using Evernote to collect my sales leads. For example I have a client... I get his business card, I make a note with a list of things that happened each time/day I spoke to the client, I have an Excel spreadsheet file, sometimes a photo.

The question is... should I make a new Notebook per client or one Notebook named "business" and have all my clients in that Notebook relying on Tags to find everything on a client when needed.

The issue is I will be getting 5-10 clients a days (leads)... I like the idea of doing my organization separated by Notebook but that will leave a long list of clients. Also maybe I'm making myself too much work?

What do you guys think?

Thanks for any advice,

- Oliver

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

You are limited to 100 notebooks, so IME, it's best to have fewer notebooks. You may even see how you get by simply by using the client's name in all their notes. IE, if your clients are normally businesses instead of individuals (IE, say if you're a stockbroker, your clients would often be individuals & you may run into different clients with the same name), you may be able to simply make sure "Acme Metal" is in either the title and/or body of all notes for Acme Metal. Then, simply searching on "Acme Metal" (in quotes, so you don't get all notes with both the word Acme & the word metal), will filter out all those notes w/o even using tags.

FWIW, from your brief description, I think if it were me, I'd preface all titles of the notes by the client's name. If you're getting 5-10 leads per day, your tag list will grow quickly. IME, by the time you search through a huge tag list, you could have already searched on the name. OR...you could assign tags by client name in conjunction with adding the names in the note titles, so you could peruse the list of tags for the client names, in case you forget all the names. But I bet for clients you remember, you'll find it's faster to simply search.

If you do use tags for each client, I'd make a parent tag of "clients" & put them all under that. That way, if you're looking for something else in the tag list, you can close up the long list of client tags.

[jbenson2 2,147]

I started Evernote with a lot of notebooks, but realized the power of tags and did a major overhaul after a couple months. I now only have 8 major notebooks, but several hundred tags.

I keep company names under a tag named Company. But I tweak the actual tag of the specific company just a bit. All companies are tagged with com- in front of their name. Example: com-UPS, com-Hewlett Packard, com-Allstate. The com- prefix helps in searches.

[thingstocome 0]

Very good info!... I didn't realize there was a 100 notebook limit. I will have more than 100 leads in 2-3 months so I will definitely use tags. Thanks for both your answers... I will think of a tagging system that works for me.

ps. I'm in the energy conservation business and I help commercial properties go green by getting them government or utility company rebates and implementing measures such as lighting retrofits, new HVAC systems, etc...