Help organizing years and years of disorganization :(

[yugoport 5]

Hi folks,

 

I started using evernote years ago, back to 2008, but for some reason it never convinced me completely, but I understood (kinda) the power of it and always sent a lot of stuff to it. The main problem is that I never understood how the tags worked, so i kept adding notes with a bunch of tags in a bunch of note books, so today, after 8 years, 3 of them as a premium user, I have a massive  amount of notes that are not organized the way they should.

Does anyone ever faced something similar or do you guys have any idea in how to organize these notes/tags without having to create a new account or something extreme?

Thank you in advance,

[DTLow 5,736]

6 hours ago, yugoport said:

Does anyone ever faced something similar or do you guys have any idea in how to organize these notes/tags without having to create a new account or something extreme?

Its easier to cleanup if you're using the Windows/Mac platforms

My process would be to clear the way for your new organization

1. Apply a tag like "Under Review" to your existing notes
2. Move the old notebooks into a stack so they're out of the way
3. Prefix the old tags/notebooks with "x" so they're at the bottom of the list and out of the way

For my organization structure

1. I use minimal notebooks so it's unusual for me to have any new notebooks
2. My tags are all under a parent tag(s)
   I do create new tags on the fly, but they easily stand out to be and can be fit into my structure in a later review
3. I have a structure to my note titles   <subject> yyyy/mm/dd <description>

[gazumped 11,666]

I'd argue against the need for an immediate clean up.  I'm lazy.  My notes (around 34,000) are 97% in one notebook and largely untagged.  The rest are shared, local or work-in-progress.  I find my bills and correspondence are all nicely tied together by my customer number with various organisations,  my car registration or address.  I can usually think of some unique factor to identify the note(s) I need,  so all I really have to do is search.  Date and location keys also help.

Where I search for something and find it difficult to zoom in on the note(s) I need,  or if I need quick access back to it/ them for some reason - tickets or some such - I'll set up a saved search or otherwise use a tag.

I do delete dupiicated notes when I find them,  and merge,  re-title and generally curate information as I work through it,  but that's an ongoing task with any database if you want to keep it lean and mean.

 

[CalS 5,280]

I would start with tags and trim them to the ones you want.  Search for notes by the tag, bulk change to the preferred tag (Ctrl-Alt-T) and then delete the old tag from one of the notes in the list..

After tags are complete, for notebooks I would add a tag to each note representing the notebook name, create the notebooks you want (as few as possible), then start moving notes.  When you are comfortable everything is in the right place, you can delete the notebook name tags.