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How Do You Organize Your Notes?


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I am using Evernote more every day.  My notes now number over 1,000 and I have started using it for taxes.  I agree that tagging can be less frustrating that multiple notebooks and I will try to reduce the number of notebooks I maintain.  However, there is one drawback to limited notebooks: sharing.  I can email a single note, but I cannot email a collection of tagged notes.  I can share an entire notebook.  This has been very useful for taxes.  I place my secured documents in a shared folder and share that folder with my CPA.  

 

It does appear to me that you could load your taxes into a common notebook, tag them "Taxes 2013," and then move them to a temporary notebook for sharing.  

 

The main problem I find is too many returned notes when I forget the correct search term.  More practice may make perfect, but this is my view.

 

Now, I am using the ScanSnap scanner.  It is zero frustration and worth the expense to me, but it does move common document to a common notebook that later needs to be sorted with tags or moved to another notebook.  Still, it is the best solution I have found so far.

 

Equipment:  MacBook Pro, Evernote Desktop, iPad, iPhone

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It does appear to me that you could load your taxes into a common notebook, tag them "Taxes 2013," and then move them to a temporary notebook for sharing.  

 

 

That's a good solution... or else, use notebooks predominantly for sharing purposes. That would mean consolidating a lot of the stuff that you do not need to share into one or more notebooks... and tagging them according to what the previous notebooks that housed them were named. This should free up more notebooks for sharing... if you really need that many in the first place. 

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  • Level 5*

Notebooks have several standard use cases (meaning you cannot get around using separate notebooks for these cases):

* To share a group of notes

* To ensure that a group of notes is available on a mobile device when you're offline (designate a notebook as "offline")

* To ensure that a group of notes is never synced to the Evernote servers from a desktop machine (create a local notebook)

 

There's another pretty good use case: as targets of inputs like scanners and emails and imported documents that need to be correctly tagged before being moved to their appropriate destination notebook. This seems to fit your use case with respect to your scanner. Every so often, process the notes in your scanned documents folder and file them away as needed. Organizing early makes things easier later on.

 

If you need to share your tax notes, then a separate notebook is the way to go. Create it and use it and don't worry about it (also tag the notes if you like; you'll probably want that later). You can easily isolate to just those notes using a notebook filter, rather than a tag filter. When you're done for the year and don't need to share the notebook any more, make sure that everything gets a "Taxes 2013" (or whatever) tag, and move them off to an archive notebook. On to next year.

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* To ensure that a group of notes is available on a mobile device when you're offline (designate a notebook as "offline")

* To ensure that a group of notes is never synced to the Evernote servers from a desktop machine (create a local notebook)

 

Brilliant, Jefito! I'd never considered these 2 points before as a case for the moderate to heavy use of notebooks. 

 

Also, in line with your 4th use case, 3rd party apps automatically create and use their own notebooks (or else are pointed toward notebooks) as part and parcel of the sync setup. Here are a few i have used:

  • vJournal (Creates a "My Journal" stack)
  • IFTTT
  • Penultimate
  • Bamboo
  • Gneo (A dedicated stack with notebooks to mirror the app setup)
  • Swipes (pointed to notebooks of your choice)
  • Evernote Sticky Notes: http://hosting.edo-soft.com/stickynotes/
  • ... and dozens more

Along similar lines:

  • Import folders (on desktop) are also notebook-based.
  • Interestingly, the new iOS web clipper for Safari does not yet include a tagging option, which would necessitate later sorting 
  • The Reminders list does not sort according to tags, but rather according to notebook sections
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I use a process similar to what you are trying to do.  Per Jeff, I tag items right after I scan or download them, but I move them to a local notebook.  I also encrypt the PDFs, same password for all.  There may be a dose of OCD here, but I have a set of tags that begin with 1040:  1040,Backup, 1040.Cons.1099, 1040.Sched.A through 1040.W-2 as needed.  Since I have been doing this for a few years now, I pair the 1040 tags with a year tag represented by Fyyyy, F2014 for example.  

 

Then with fairly simple searches I can readily find things.  When it is tax time, I create a tax Notebook for sharing and move the notes (search of tag:F2014 tag:1040*).  After tax time, move the notes back to local and delete the tax Notebook.  FWIW.

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