Feanor33

I think of it in three levels, Stacks > Notebooks > Notes. However you count it, we're talking about the same thing. So the point of my post doesn't get lost: Evernote could give users a choice of the number of notebook levels they want in the settings. Sure. That could be an option in settings. But some people seem to like the current setup (as this thread shows), so why not keep them happy?

Great summary of the problem @mtanne! Evernote could even give users a choice of the number of notebook levels they want in the settings. That way, people who like the current three levels don't have anything to worry about, and everybody's happy. There is a way to sort out this 10-year-old issue.

As far as I can make out, you can't put notebook stacks into a space... Is that correct?

I wasn't intending to revive the debate (I withdraw the Neanderthal remark), but thanks for the comments. I would like Evernote to add another level, so I gave my 2c. Like I said, limiting the hierarchy forces you to be organised, but I think they have got the wrong number of levels. Putting things in a notebook, then searching by tag(s) to find the subgroups is unworkable, because I can't remember every tag. I use Evernote for almost everything in my life. There would be a lot of tags. If I organise things by a tag hierarchy, I can't search all the notes in a top level tag easily, as I can with notebooks. If I click a top level tag, it returns all the notes below it, but if you then search, it searches all notes. Finally, it's really easy using drag and drop to organise my notes with notebooks. But with tags, it's quite a bit harder. To move notes between tags, you have to type the tag and delete the old one. That's two steps, instead of dragging and dropping. And I also have to remember what tag it should go under (I can't use drag and drop to find where it's going), and not do a typo (it's easy to do) and file it somewhere else. If you can show ways around these frustrations, I'd be grateful. This is a consequence of wanting notes to only be in one location. Tags are not conducive to that end. I agree they are an organisational structure (my bad), but you've sharpened what I was trying to say: Most notes (like most things in the universe with a name of any kind) have only one primary defining feature: Work notes are first and foremost about work, not anything else. Tags, by their nature, do not easily recognise a primary feature, although they pick up non-primary features easily and can accommodate the messiness of non-primary hierarchies. Notebooks do recognise the primary defining feature of each note. The primary feature of a note is nested, however. It has a single chain of hierarchy associated with its primariness (that's what you used to classify it as primary). If you had more than one chain, the feature wouldn't be primary, it would be ambiguous (is it classified as this or that or both?). The primary nature of a note is excellent for organisation, because it is where it is most dissimilar from everything else. Let me know if you find my reasoning faulty. Notebooks are like taxonomy: a species can only be classified one way. Tags are like attributes: a species can have several colours. Especially in creative work, it's very helpful to do the latter. The seven major classifications of taxonomy (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) are enough to adequately classify all of life on earth. My question is whether the three levels in Evernote are adequate to classify everybody's notes in Evernote. To capture most of the major sources of variation in human life with the fewest possible categories, I think you need four levels (Areas of responsiblity>Roles/Projects>Role/Project parts>Information block); I don't think three is enough. If I only had work in evernote, I'd be fine - I'd have cut out one level. But I don't - I have work, family, hobbies etc. I suspect Evernote has run trials with different types of hierarchies, and three came out best, so I'm probably wasting my time here. But if they haven't, that's what they should do.

Tags are not, in my opinion, a way of organising notes. They create links between notes that wouldn't normally be together, to aid searching and finding notes. They aren't for organisation, they're for finding organisationally separate notes. Evernote's facebook poll showed clearly that most people use notebooks for organising notes: Ideally, from the way Evernote is set up, you should organise your notes with notebooks and add extra tags to aid searching/finding. That's a brilliant system, because it combines structure and flexibility. That's the way blogs do it: organised by date, then use tags for finding; almost every website keeps tags separate from the menus, for very good reasons. They aren't mean to do the same thing. They are meant to complement each other. But the weird thing in Evernote's 'answer' is that it creates conflict between notebooks and tags: use tags, they say, for hierarchy. That nearly destroys the purpose of notebooks, which are very structured (a note can only exist in one notebook, while it can have multiple tags). And it doesn't let tags do their job: I now can't separate my structure from my finding. I think Evernote's resistance is that allowing only three levels (notes, notebooks, notebook stacks) forces people to be really organised. It's certainly helped me in that regard, and it gives their product an edge for good reason. So I like limited hierarchy. But I think they've misjudged the number of notebook levels necessary for people to get organised. I think one more level would fix things. The reason is this. Think of how people organise their lives. Nearly every person on the planet has the same basic groups of responsibility in their life: personal, work, family, hobbies, social clubs/activities, which is a superb way to organise things, because they don't often cross over each other. Each responsibility has distinct blocks, like personal (exercise; diet stuff; spiritual; documents; contacts; photos; garden), work (Grants; several Experiments; Projects). And here is the catch: Some of those blocks are fine as a single notebook (eg personal contacts). But some aren't, like work projects which can warrant entire notebooks just for emails, another for meetings, another for statistical analysis, another for report writing. If people used Evernote for just one area of life, like work, you wouldn't need the extra level. Problem is, they do. To illustrate the problem. I have a notebook stack for work (and a bunch of others for other areas of life). I am currently writing several papers (just like many people would have several projects running at work) simultaneously for work. Each one is using a separate dataset, a separate set of experiments, separate emails, separate meetings notes. So each paper warrants several notebooks. But I can't do that unless I take the paper outside the work notebook stack and make a stack for each paper. That's a pain, because it stuffs up my organisation and makes it difficult to find my stacks in a spot where they shouldn't be. Add at least one more level to notebooks. Call it a shelf or something. Make it graphically distinct. But add more levels to notebooks.

+1 for atlas