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How do you organize your stacks?


Aurora A.

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I'm a tagger with mininmal notebooks, however the same organization applies. 
I use a prefix naming standard so it doesn't matter if a hierarchy is supported.

A sample of my organization is
?Who  
      ?Business 
      ?Family
!What
      !Templates
       !Types
               !Type-Receipt
                        !Budget
                               !Budget-FoodGroceries
                        !Vendor
                              !Vendor-Walmart
               !Type-Appointments
               !Type-Reference
                      !Ref-Applescript
                      !Ref-Evernote    
@Where    
        @Canada

                 @BC
                         @Victoria 
.When
          .2018

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14 hours ago, Aurora A. said:

I'd like to see how other people organize their stacks

That is a lot of notebooks for me, but if it works for you that is the most important thing of course. I have BUSINESS NOTEBOOKS and PERSONAL NOTEBOOKS stacks mainly and I have 4-5 notebooks under each.

I handle the rest with the tags. I only use the notebook search or look in a stack, when I know something is work related or personal. Otherwise I don't search within notebooks much.

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I have two stacks, synced (EN.Stack) and local (Home.Stack).  5 notebooks in EN.Stack including INBOX for clearing house and Quick for offline support in IOS, 3 Notebooks in Home.Stack including Scans for importing.  Tagger as well, close to all of my searches are All Notes context, tags do the heavy lifting.  More of a lateral thinker I suppose.

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I'm in the keep it simple brigade - most of my notes are in my default notebook (no stack) with keywords and dates in the title so I can find a lot of relevant information with an "intitle:<keyword(date)>" search.  I do have a stack for 'Admin' where I keep templates and lookup tables that (probably) shouldn't be edited,  and a stack for 'Shared Notes/ Notebooks' so I don't accidentally delete something that I shared out. 

Any number of temporary notebooks and stacks come and go,  but the theme is "don't create anything new unless it's absolutely vital to do so."

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10 hours ago, TK0047 said:

That is a lot of notebooks for me, but if it works for you that is the most important thing of course. I have BUSINESS NOTEBOOKS and PERSONAL NOTEBOOKS stacks mainly and I have 4-5 notebooks under each.

I handle the rest with the tags. I only use the notebook search or look in a stack, when I know something is work related or personal. Otherwise I don't search within notebooks much.

2

I realize that I'm one of the few who don't rely too much on tags but rather stacks. Good to know! Can you list some examples of tags you use? 

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13 hours ago, Aurora A. said:

I guess that's the name of the notebook? Admin? Do you also have a table of contents note? 

I have a few ToC notes for different projects,  and some saved searches to jump to those notes when I need to.  They're in the default notebook.  There's no overall table of contents.

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On 8/4/2018 at 8:08 PM, Aurora A. said:

I realize that I'm one of the few who don't rely too much on tags but rather stacks. Good to know! Can you list some examples of tags you use? 

Sure. For example, you have a notebook called Receipts. I have a tag for receipts and put those in a Personal Reference Notebook. I also tag them depending on what category they will be under, such as "Electronics", "Hotel", "Restaurant". So when I am looking for a receipt, I just need to use my shortcuts for tags and get to it without having to think about a notebook.

I have a "Reading" tag for articles I capture.

I have project numbers for business as tags, so I can locate notes related to a project quickly. 

It is similar to your notebook | stack structure but you handle it with tags which gives you more flexibility to organize information and not be limited with "only one notebook per note", assign as many as tags you want (within allowed limit I am sure).

But again, if something is working for you, and you don't have any "Pain Points", it wouldn't be smart to change it just because others are doing it. But if you are experiencing friction, or pain points, you might want to look into tags.

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On 8/4/2018 at 5:08 PM, Aurora A. said:

I realize that I'm one of the few who don't rely too much on tags but rather stacks. Good to know! Can you list some examples of tags you use? 

In some ways it's the same organization, but an important distinction is that multiple tags can be assigned to a note.

Using receipts as an example, I assign tag: Type-Receipt
I also identify a vendor; tag Vendor-aaaaaaa
I also identify a budget category; tag Budget-bbbbbbb 
Other categories, perhaps Tax

This gives me three+ views of the same data.

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Another receipt example.  I tag them with Receipt and _YYYY and then use text search to find things.   

Less structure can sometimes save time while not impairing the ability to find things, thanks to the search engine.  I can add a tag if there is something special about the receipt, 1040.Sched.A for a tax deduction for example, but typically don't.  The lazy way I know.... 

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45 minutes ago, CalS said:

Another receipt example.  I tag them with Receipt and _YYYY

Just curious about the usecase for tag _YYYY
We have created date, and I prefix the title with the subject date (yyyy/mm/dd Receipt ...)

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15 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Just curious about the usecase for tag _YYYY
We have created date, and I prefix the title with the subject date (yyyy/mm/dd Receipt ...)

Just trying to be specific to the year since there isn't one format of year on receipts.  Since I batch scan receipts, typically not same day, it is easy to bulk tag adding the year tag.  Rarely do I change the the title of receipt notes.  Mostly they are of the form 2018_08_04_12_41_30.pdf.  Again, search does the heavy lifting.

Also, I use the year tag for other items, mostly tax and medical records.    

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I use stacks mainly as a recurring pre-filter for searches, so that I can just click on a stack and search right away inside all the notebooks in that stack.

So even if I have two notebooks where the subjects are closely related, I may split them up in different stacks that are right next to each other if I usually don't want to search with both of them included..

This strategy also lets me have two different notebooks on the same subject, but where I put only the more important notes on that same subject in one of those notebooks. So if I want to search all my notes on that subject by including both notebooks in the search, I just click on the stack.

I use tags for actual relationships and hierarchies.

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I try to keep the number of notebooks at minimum and will organize everything else with tags.
 
For stacks I do something like this:
 
.INBOX
.SHARED
.TEMP
01_SOMETHING
02_HOME
  • 02 Medical
  • 02 Recipes
03_ANOTHER
 
- There are 3 notebooks not in any stack: INBOX, SHARED and TEMP. INBOX is for everything that I’m capturing during the day (namely, things I need to review), SHARED is for very specific notes I have with a friend, and TEMP is for notes I’m currently working on (sort of a pre-stage before selecting a proper notebook).
- Numbering the Stacks to keep them structured in a way that I can identify the notebooks within a certain “group”. It also helps because it’ll be sorted by number and will let me free to name it whatever I want.
- All notebooks are identified by said numbers. { If I’m not mistaken, I used it in the past for when I was on mobile. But, now I’m just using them because I got used to. }
- Capslock for Stacks to visually differentiate them from notebooks.
 
 
Tagging

type [ : ]

  • Ex::articles :news :memo

contents [ ! ]

  • Ex: !mindmap !maps !schemes !template

people [ ? ]

  • Ex: ?john ?mary ?anthony

personalities [ @ ]

  • I call it personalities to differentiate from people I know. Ex: @james-bach @cem-kaner @jared-spool @don-norman

status [ + ]

  • +to-read +closed +ongoing +pending

titles [ $ ]

  • $harry-potter $ironman $sherlock 

no symbols

  • Subjects or categories to help me quickly identify all notes I have about a specific topic.
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