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Need help figuring out how to reorganize my notes


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I made the mistake of making many notebooks, and then making separate notes that I was kind of viewing as "sections". For example I have a notebook titled "Pre-K" then I made notes such as "science", "math", "lesson plans", "books I own", "required schedule elements", etc. 

My thinking was that this would make it easier to organize my ideas. That I would add science activity ideas to the science page, etc. I did not fully realize the issue until I tried using the web clipper. I was saving a science activity and my only choices were the notebooks, so I chose "pre-K". Then I went to go see if I could move it to the "section" on science and was not able to. So can anyone help me figure out how to fix this? Should I just have one big notebook called pre k with everything tagged? I am so confused!

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The hierarchy in Evernote is

  • Stack
  • Notebooks
    • Notes with tags

Why not have Pre-K Science as a notebook
Or even better, Pre-K Science as a tag; the Mac web clipper allows you to assign tags
My workflow is to only create notebooks for their special features (sharing, local)

With your present system of notes/sections, don't you find your notes are getting too large to handle easily?
Evernote works better with a collection of short notes instead of a massive note.
If you still want a single note, I would merge them after the clipping.

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17 hours ago, amywah said:

I made the mistake of making many notebooks, and then making separate notes that I was kind of viewing as "sections".
. . .
So can anyone help me figure out how to fix this? Should I just have one big notebook called pre k with everything tagged? I am so confused!

This is a common problem faced by new Evernote users.  The first thing to realize is that there is no "best way", or "right way" to organize your notes -- only the way that works best for you.  And, it will likely take some trial and error (as you are now experiencing) to figure this out.

There has been much written about organizing Evernote, both in these forums and externally in blogs and other Internet articles.  So you can always do a Google on "Evernote organization" to find a lot of these articles/posts.

Over a year ago, I wrote this post:  evernote organization , which provides an overview and some helpful references.

Since then, I have reorganized my account of over 15,000 notes using a system I call "pseudo notebooks".
For more info see:  
Using Tags as Pseudo Notebooks

While notebooks are definitely useful for some things, and required for some things (like sharing blocks of notes), in general Tags are more flexible and have much fewer restrictions.  As a result, many users here suggest using only a few notebooks, and organizing/categorizing your notes using tags.  I changed from having about 60 notebooks to only 5 notebooks when I reorganized to use pseudo notebooks.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes, and if you have any further questions.

 

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You might consider breaking your science note into individual notes with a tag of Science, ditto for the other subjects.  Then you can tag your clips with Science and when you do a tag:science search in the notebook Pre-K you will get all your science notes.  If you have a lesson plan per subject you could consider adding a tag lesson.plan to each note in addition to the subject tag.  Then a tag:science tag:lesson.plan would return the science lesson plan or a search tag:lesson.plan would return all lesson plans.  May or may not fit your work flow, but a way to accomplish the task.  Easy enough to get a few of the methods in the thread and try and see what works best for you.

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