How to organize my notes efficiently ?

[princecaspian 0]

Hi

 

This is my first post, i hope i didn't post in the wrong forum, if so my apologizes !

 

I'm new in evernote, only using it for a couple of week, and i have a question: How to organize my notes efficiently ? 

 

I'm a student and i like to see my notes organized perfectly. 

I'm listening to a lot of lectures, by different lecturers, dealing with different topics. 

And i don't know how to organize them ?

At first i wanted to create one stack for school and one for personnal and then add a lectures notebook in my School stacks but then i don't know how to rename each lectures with different topics/lectures in different date. 

 

For example i have these type of notes: 

 

Semester 1: 

Lecturer 1: Computer 

- Lecture 1: topic 1

- Lecture 2: topic 2

- Lecture 3:  topic 3

 

Lecturer 2: 

- Lecture 1: topic 1

- Lecture 2: topic 2

...

- Lecture 30:  topic 30

 

etc..

 

Semester 2: 

Lecturer 1: Computer 

- Lecture 1: topic 1

- Lecture 2: topic 2

- Lecture 3:  topic 3

 

Lecturer 2: 

- Lecture 1: topic 1

- Lecture 2: topic 2

...

- Lecture 30:  topic 30

 

What would be the best ?

One lecture stack with all lecture notes named like this: "Lecturer 1 - Semester 1 - Topic"

Or make a Lecture stack with One notebook for each lecturer ?

 

I'm afraid if i end up with 1000 of notebooks in the future..

 

Thanks for you advice and for your answers. 

 

 

 

[Jim Finn 4]

One way you could do it is as follows.

 

Semister 1 as the notebook Stack.

Lecturer 1 etc as notebooks (Alternatively you could use the module title as the notebook title (CSS101 - Intro to CSS)

Use Note Titles, tags and Created Date to organise them in each notebook. e.g. (Title - Lecture 1 - intro to CSS, Lecture 1 - Research) Created Date as the date of the Lecture.

 

I've been using Evernote for a few years and I have reorganised the structure of my notes a few times over the years as my use evolves. (I have 1500 notes and 60 notebooks over 8 Stacks at the moment but this is constantly growing and evolving as I add new projects and uses).

 

Don't be afraid to change the layout as you figure out what works best for your needs

[Analyst444 182]

princecaspian - Good for you to be focused enough to start addressing the issue of notes when you are a student.

 

My opening suggestion would be for you to think through in your mind what your terms "efficiently" and "organized perfectly" mean for you. For example, do they mean that you are able to add new Notes fast? Or search and find them quickly in the future? Or share them with other students? - - - As you are new to Evernote, that may be a difficult thing to do at this point.

 

There are many ways for a person to structure Notes using Evernote. I, like Jim Finn in the post above, changed my structure a couple times as my needs have changed. So, over the next few weeks, try out a couple different structures and figure out what works best for you.

 

Jim Finn suggested a structure. Here are a couple ideas from me.

 

My concept for Notebooks is that they represent parts of our lives that typically don't overlap. Your idea of a Notebook for "School" and one for "Personal" fits my concept.

 

Now, create a Note named "Courses". This Note will have an Evernote "Table" in it. It will be a list of courses you are taking. Each row in the Table will be a course. The columns will be data elements about course. For example, the columns could be:

• Course #
• Course Name
• Lecturer
• Year you took the course
• Semester #
• Building
• Floor
• Room

or whatever data elements are important to you.

(If a course may have multiple lecturers, then don't include that column in the Table.) 

 

Each of the other Notes that you create would be for one Note for each Lecture. The Title of the Note would reference the Course in the Course Table and the topic of the lecture. The Title could be something like, "###-AAAAAAAAAAA-TTTTTTTTTT", where ### is the course #, AAAAAAAAAAA is the course name, and TTTTTTTTTT is the lecture topic.

 

Inside the Note, include the date of the lecture (or use Evenote's Create Date" field for that) and the lecturer, if there are multiple lecturers for a course. The rest of the Note would be where you put information from the lecture.

 

This leaves the question, "What do you use the Evernote Tags for?" Well, you don't need to use them at all or use them to associate special topics, people, places, or times *who, what, when, and where) to the Note.

 

I hope these ideas lead you to a structure that best works for you.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi

 

This is my first post, i hope i didn't post in the wrong forum, if so my apologizes !

 

I'm new in evernote, only using it for a couple of week, and i have a question: How to organize my notes efficiently ? 

 

I'm a student and i like to see my notes organized perfectly. 

I'm listening to a lot of lectures, by different lecturers, dealing with different topics. 

And i don't know how to organize them ?

At first i wanted to create one stack for school and one for personnal and then add a lectures notebook in my School stacks but then i don't know how to rename each lectures with different topics/lectures in different date. 

 

For example i have these type of notes: 

 

Semester 1: 

Lecturer 1: Computer 

- Lecture 1: topic 1

- Lecture 2: topic 2

- Lecture 3:  topic 3

 

Lecturer 2: 

- Lecture 1: topic 1

- Lecture 2: topic 2

...

- Lecture 30:  topic 30

 

etc..

 

Semester 2: 

Lecturer 1: Computer 

- Lecture 1: topic 1

- Lecture 2: topic 2

- Lecture 3:  topic 3

 

Lecturer 2: 

- Lecture 1: topic 1

- Lecture 2: topic 2

...

- Lecture 30:  topic 30

 

What would be the best ?

One lecture stack with all lecture notes named like this: "Lecturer 1 - Semester 1 - Topic"

Or make a Lecture stack with One notebook for each lecturer ?

 

I'm afraid if i end up with 1000 of notebooks in the future..

 

Thanks for you advice and for your answers.

Hi. Welcome to the forums! You have gotten some great advice so far from other users. Let me add my advice to the mix. I am a graduate student (finishing in a few days) and have developed a system that works well for me. Your mileage may vary.

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

An example of how my class notes look this year (I am teaching, not taking these classes, so it is "teaching" instead of "listening"):

130829 teaching 295-05 east asia in world history class 01

130903 teaching 295-05 east asia in world history class 02

Then, I make a "table of contents," or "index" note and I am all set for the semester.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=488

What about notebooks and tags? I don't use them. They are perfectly fine to use, and you might want to have them, but I have found them unnecessary. A search for intitle:teaching will pull up all of my classes in chronological order (the dates are YYMMDD) and intitle:"295-05" will pull up all of my classes for this course. Alternatively, I could search for the table of contents note (named something like "130819 teaching 295-05 east asia in world history index") to browse through my notes. For more on advanced search grammar, see:

http://evernote.com/contact/support/kb/#/article/23245321

Of course, this may not work for you. I recommend keeping it in mind, though, because sometimes the best organization is none at all.

[TheOfficialSeb 2]

Hello

I'm a long time user, first time poster.

My system for organising my university notes is to have an 'Education Stack" inside which is a notebook for all the CURRENT courses that I am taking. I then also have a notebook titled "The University Of Greenwich" where all my notes from previous courses go.

Once a course is finished I move those notes to the "university of Greenwich" notebook.

TIPS:

AUTO TITLES. I have found the feature where Evernote titles a note automatically as what I am currently doing in my calendar. So this makes it easy to have notes with the title of the course. It saves time.

TAGGING:

I tag many of my education related notes with a few tags. These are: SLIDES, REFERENCE, LECTURE and TUTORIAL.

This makes quick searches within Course notebooks really easy.

Hope this helps.

[JayF 30]

Lots of good advice here.  As a college professor, two reasons that I think Evernote is a good tool for students because (a) you can  organize (and reorganize) notes as your note collection changes, and ( you can accumulate and interrelate notes across your courses from year to year.

 

 I have collected some ideas for ways that students can use Evernote in ways that extend the value of their notes.  The link is:  www.evernoteaturi.wikispaces.com. Hopefully, it will give you some ideas you can use. 

 

Jay Fogleman

[jbenson2 2,147]

Lots of good advice here.  As a college professor, two reasons that I think Evernote is a good tool for students because (a) you can  organize (and reorganize) notes as your note collection changes, and ( you can accumulate and interrelate notes across your courses from year to year.

 

 I have collected some ideas for ways that students can use Evernote in ways that extend the value of their notes.  The link is:  www.evernoteaturi.wikispaces.com. Hopefully, it will give you some ideas you can use. 

 

Jay Fogleman

 

Well done! Lots of good info on your wiki. Thanks for sharing.

[Candid 167]

My only real quibble, is I am not a big fan of numbering the lectures. I like just using the date instead. In my world, at some point, I'm going to lose track of what lecture number I'm on and I'll end up spending time looking for it, so I'd just put the date.

[MiraMain 0]

I'm not good with cascading notes. I always forget what's inside the parent items and end up making new redundant parents. I use numerous tags instead. In my online university, each term is about 8-9 weeks long. So I combine the code of the class and the week I'm in. All my assignments, research results, textbooks of class BUS12345 in the first week, go to tag "BUS12345 Week 1" and so forth. Therefore, I don't mistakenly use material week 1 when I'm in week 6, for example. Before the exam, I save my search for every week under BUS12345 and bingo, I got my self the entire materials for the course.

[LL3 0]

I use a combination of Titles, Tags, and Notebooks.

 

My first division is by classes. I use notebooks for these. I have the name of the class and its code.

 

My second division is by What type of file is it? and I use Titles for these. It would be a prefix.

Presentations: Power point presentations. I try and extract all the information out of it and put it in note format so I can edit it on my phone better.

Review: I use this for all the test review files that I get. Either pdfs scanned in or written

Lecture: Date#: I use this for the lectures that I take in class. This would include scanned in hand written pages and mp3 lecture recordings.

Organizational: I use this for scheduling and syllabuses, TA contacts, relevant clubs, times to meet etc.

Annotations: For random junk files that are necessary but don't really have a place. I like to use this for resources like a chart of the human anatomy that would not be relevant for just one Test. 

Book notes: I use this for notes I've taken from the book.

Book: Chapter #: I use this one for EBook sections (I have them in PDFs and then break them down into smaller PDFs by chapter)

 

My third division would be "When is this stuff due?"/"What test is this for"

So I have tags setup for each test (and usually the professors give me the dates in advance so I know what will be for which test)

To-do: For the urgent files that need to be completed

#Class Test 1:

#Class Test 2:

#Class Test 3: 

Schedules:

Syllabuses:

 

Anyway that's my setup. It's worked well for the past two years. Good luck  

[Barrington 0]

I realize this is old threat but reply could be useful to many. I was in the same situation stuck. evernote is great for snippets etc but to organize academic material tags aren't going to cut it for me. 

I found OneNote by Microsoft has exactly that type of organization. it is also free.

 

check this you can add pages to a topic  with hierarchy.  http://prntscr.com/6whstj

[Jim Finn 4]

Hiya Barrington.

What you have there is in Evernote as well. The notebooks are your stacks. The sections are your individual notebooks and the pages are your individual notes.

I have played with one note off and on over the years and have always found it not quite right for me.

I also find that the web clipper in chrome is vastly superior for Evernote and this and the fact that I have over 2500 notes now keeps me here rather than moving. I still experiment with the alternatives from time to time and as soon as I find something better I would move no problem.

[Barrington 0]

As far as I can see evernote has two step hierarchy at most, Notebooks and Notes inside of them.

When I create separate notebook there is no way to organize notes inside that notebook and there is no way to tie in together separate notebooks with each other.

 

With onenote You have Notebook > Section (or Group of Sections which adds one more grouping hierarchy) > Each section has option for unlimited pages that stay within the section

 

See this http://prntscr.com/6wmxkr

[Analyst444 182]

Barrington, OK, I'll take the bait.

 

As Jim Finn indicated, Evernote has a "3-step hierarchy" (your terminology): Stacks, Notebooks, and Notes. Please investigate and try them out.

 

However, and more importantly, if you search this forum for the word "hierarchy" you will find quite a few people who complained over the last couple of years that even a "3-step hierarchy" is not enough. The common response from several to many Evernote proponents was that one of the developers' objectives for Evernote was to take the technology beyond the "hierarchy" concept/model/paradigm. They did that with "Tags". I humbly suggest that with "Tags" that a user can, effectively, have a "100 (or more) step hierarchy". So, I would suggest that you also investigate Evernote "Tags" and try them out, too.

 

If, after you investigate Stacks, Notebooks, Notes, Tags (and Shortcuts, for that matter), you are not able to get your "Academic Material" application to work with Evernote, then I suggest you submit another post to this forum with details as to why not. I'd guess you will get 3-5 very good responses from other members of this forum as to how to implement your application with Evernote.

[Candid 167]

Tags are much less limiting than the folder or notebook type of hierarchy that you see in Microsoft organizational structures. 

 

Let's take as a simple example a tag of professor. In Evernote's structure you can place this tag on notes that have your professor's contact information and then do a simple search to find that information. This works great for the day you have a flat or are sick. Search on the tag, instantly have all your professor's emails or phones. BUT in a folder structure you have to burrow down into each folder maybe going down multiple levels to find each file that you need. With five classes this is five separate searches.

 

The point of structure is to allow you to find material. Tags in my view do that more effectively.

 

To take a slightly more complex example still using the professor tag again, suppose you are a senior, you now have quite a few professor notes, but as part of your graduate school admission's packet you need to list professors by semester you took them. This time you search on 2 tags the professor one and a semester tag. This is works great and you don't have to sort out in your mind what class you took when because it is right there in the search. To do this in a folder hierarchy means a lot of burrowing.