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Daily work journal with multiple projects?


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Hello!

I'm a pretty new Evernote user.

 

I would like to use EN to keep my daily work log/journal.  During the course of the day, I work on more than one project and switch back and forth between projects a number of times. 

 

What I'd like to be able to do is to go back and read all the entries pertaining to a particular project, and also read all the events of a particular day (regardless of the project specifics) ordered in time. 

 

From reading this topic, it sounds like I should use a note for each day. In that case, how would I extract just the events pertaining to a particular project from that day?

 

Alternatively, I imagine I could also make a number of notes for a single day, each note tagged to pertain to a particular project. But in that case, how would I read a listing of that day's entries in time sequence? Is there a way to combine all of a day's notes and sort according to a timestamp of the individual entries?

 

Is there an approach that would allow me to do what I'm after?

 

Thanks for any help!

 

W.

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  • Level 5*

How you set up your notes and notebooks is a very personal issue,  with some conflict (usually) between what's ideal,  and what is actually feasible.  In your situation forinstance I'd keep a temporary separate notebook for each project and make my daily notes individually in each notebook.  The created date (and time) of each note will keep them in order,  and -if you have several things on the go at once- you can have as many notes open on screen at the same time as your sanity will stand if you open each one in its own window.  Tag each note with "log" or some such.  A global search on tag:log sorted by created date will give you all your notes for all your projects in chrono order.  Want notes for just one project? Search in that notebook only.

 

Note (pun intended) that you would make incident-by-incident notes as things come up - this is not going to work if you have one long log for all the issues relating to that project in one note.  So: Ctrl-N for a new note and assign it to the appropriate project notebook.

 

And when your projects are completed,  tag all the notes in that notebook with the project name,  and move them to an Archive file.  They're still searchable and easily retrievable in case of need.

 

Hope that helps...

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Gazumped, thank you!

 

What you've proposed should allow me to do what I want. Making every incidental entry a new note is a tad nonintuitive, but nothing I couldn't get quickly used to  :)

 

Keeping all the day's entries in a single note (my initial approach) would have been doable if there was a way to tag portions of a note, but I don't think EN allows that. 

 

Thanks again,

W.

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One other thing you might consider, its what I do, if you have a notebook for each project, Once a week or even at the end of the project, I merge all of those notes into one big note, then move that single note to a archive notbook. It makes it nice and clean and keeps a record of what happend durring the project, incase you have to refernce something later. If the big single note is too big, then I would break it in half IE Part 1, or Part 2 Etc.

I have used this for a while now, and with the Evernote search power, makes finding information on past projects easy. But keeps things looking clean and efficient.

I even keep a daily log of work, then merge all of those into one note at the end of the month.

I also use GTD. :-)

Good luck.

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Westerly, the way I interpret your need is that you want to be able to see a list of all events for a project in a list and all events on a given day in a list. This implies to me that each Note in Evernote can only be about a specific, single day and a specific, single project. If that were not the case, then you could not produce either of the desired 2 lists.

 

So, if that is right, then the issue becomes how to you mark a Note as to what day it applies to and what project it applies to. The replies by the other two people should work just fine for you. Let me offer two other approaches to give you some options so you can figure out what will work best for you.

 

Approach 1 - Use the Title of each Note to indicate the day and project that the Note applies to. For example, the syntax of your Note titles could be YYYYMMDD-PPPPPPPPPP-TTTTTTTTTT, when YYYYMMDD is the date, PPPPPPPPPP is the project name, and TTTTTTTTT is optionally a 1-3 word topic which summarizes what the Note is about. You can then do searches for either a specific day or a specific project. Then, using Evernote's "List" view, you can sort the found Notes by Title to get them in the right order.

 

Approach 2 - Use the Notes' Created Date field (which you can modify) for your date and add a Tag to each Note which is the Project Name / ID.

 

One advantage to the these two approaches is that it doesn't make any difference what Notebook you place the Notes in.

 

Food for thought. Try a couple different approaches and for all the ideas that were offered to you and figure out what will likely work best for you.

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  • 4 months later...

Hi Westerley,

 

as  new member of the world of Evernote and as a project manager working on multiple sites at any one tine, I would be really interested to hear what method you have adopted, if any, in response to the answers that you received back in August 2013.

 

I am struggling to work out the best method method to keep track of multiple projects with a daily to do list plus general notes.

 

Cheers

 

Paul

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Hello Paul,

 

Hi Westerley,

 

as  new member of the world of Evernote and as a project manager working on multiple sites at any one tine, I would be really interested to hear what method you have adopted, if any, in response to the answers that you received back in August 2013.

 

I am struggling to work out the best method method to keep track of multiple projects with a daily to do list plus general notes

 

What I ended up adopting was along the lines of analyst444's approach #2: short notes through the course of the day that are task specific that I tag with 'log' and also the project name and any other tags I deem relevant to that particular note.  This allows me to see everything I did on a particular day (by searching for that particular day's notes) and also what pertains to a particular project (by searching for all the notes with the 'log' tag and the particular project name.  I like ka7ple's approach of merging notes into a large one for archival purposes, but I haven't gotten around to actually doing that… Adding the date and time to the title of the note is probably a good idea but I'm not fastidious enough to remember to do that each time!  If it was possible to automatically do that with some kind of template (i.e. the title automatically gets a timestamp added), that would be fantastic but I don't know if Evernote can do that.

 

I started out by having a separate notebook for my log posts, but then realized that I can accomplish what I want by just adding the 'log' tag (as analyst444 explained); that way I don't have to remember to make the note in the correct notebook.

 

I still haven't found a completely satisfactory solution for ToDo lists. The approach I'm now going to take is to make a note with each day's todo list using the checkbox and tag it with 'log' and 'todo'. As I go through the day, I'll tick things off the list. What would be fabulous for me is if I could tag certain parts of a single note (in this case tag individual tasks in my todo list with the associated project) but that isn't possible in Evernote, AFAIK. I suppose I could make individual ToDo notes for each project for a given day, but I just don't think that way, and I don't want my infrastructure to take more effort than actually accomplishing the various tasks  :P  What would be great is some automated way of quietly tracking WHEN I ticked something off the list without having to explicitly add text to that list item, but I don't think Evernote works that way. Even more fabulous would be a way of connecting an item on my ToDo list to the various notes that pertain to it in my 'log', and sync it with lists on my iPhone...

 

As the various seasoned users have indicated, it really is a matter of trying a few approaches out until you find something that works for you. 

 

HTH!

W.

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Hello Paul,

 

...

 

I still haven't found a completely satisfactory solution for ToDo lists. The approach I'm now going to take is to make a note with each day's todo list using the checkbox and tag it with 'log' and 'todo'. As I go through the day, I'll tick things off the list. What would be fabulous for me is if I could tag certain parts of a single note (in this case tag individual tasks in my todo list with the associated project) but that isn't possible in Evernote, AFAIK. I suppose I could make individual ToDo notes for each project for a given day, but I just don't think that way, and I don't want my infrastructure to take more effort than actually accomplishing the various tasks  :P  What would be great is some automated way of quietly tracking WHEN I ticked something off the list without having to explicitly add text to that list item, but I don't think Evernote works that way. Even more fabulous would be a way of connecting an item on my ToDo list to the various notes that pertain to it in my 'log', and sync it with lists on my iPhone...

 

As the various seasoned users have indicated, it really is a matter of trying a few approaches out until you find something that works for you. 

 

HTH!

W.

 

Take a look at the Informant discussion.

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