Or: There and back again, how I started my journey with Evernote.
- Work
- Home
- Mark’s Stuff
- Archive
As I amassed notes in the folders, I found myself trying to quantify whether or not they should go in one notebook or another. “What about if they fit in more than one notebook??” “Oh, my Gawd. What should I do???”
I slowed down my note creation to a near stop for some time until I decided I wanted to try using tags with the notes. THAT led to another whirlwind of gigantic proportions. I wound up with 200-300 tags that mostly sat there and “gathered dust”. I took another break.
I took all my notes except the 2-3 in my archive folder and dragged them all to the default folder. The archive folder contents were:
- The first note ever in my account, so I could know when I opened the account.
- A note with a link to the email download program for my phone at the time
- A note about configuring Gmail on that old phone
Those three notes are still in that folder, even to this day. Just… because.
I rethought the notebook structure; I made one for work, stuff that I needed to reference quickly, and one that all new notes would be created in. (To change the default notebook for all new notes, right-click the notebook and look for properties and then “Make this my default notebook”)
Over the next few weeks, I searched for common topics that might fit into “work”. Stuff like “server”, “how-to”, and other such things. When I found them, I moved them all to the new “Work” notebook. The process didn’t take too long as at the time I had not gotten higher than 500-800 notes.
When doing such things, I strongly suggest you download the desktop app. It makes searching, moving and all the other work of changing things a whole lot easier.
When I started creating topic notebooks, that’s when I started gathering notes.
- Jokes
- Links
- Journal
- Phone
- Quotes
- Notes for games I play
- Movies
- etc…
Pretty soon I began to level off on the number of notebooks I create and kept adding notes to the proper notebooks. I stopped thinking “where do I put this?” and started thinking “I need to keep a note on this in case I see this again.”
That’s when the number of notes I have in my account started to climb. Eventually I got over a thousand, then over two thousand. Ranging from hacking stuff around the house/work, to how-to, and “props” emails.
When they enabled all accounts so that everyone could email notes to their notebooks, I started using that to capture links from my phone. (See how to email to your notebook: http://evernote.com/contact/support/kb/#!/article/23480523)
I reached a point where all the links needed to have a better system. I began to think of them as “Good,” “bad”, and “ugly.” Good ones were to stuff that stays around a long time. Bad ones were ones that worked but weren’t something you would consider safe for work or politically correct. The ugly ones were links that used to work but I wasn’t sure if they were having issues or completely gone from the web. After a time, however, I deleted the ugly link folder and called it a day.
I found a way to add automatically any Google Reader starred items to an Evernote notebook for storage. I found a way to add certain RSS feed entries in other readers to the notebook. For a while I was keeping notes on my Twitter posts until Twitter changed everything around with the API for the millionth time and locked that out.
I suggest after a few months that you, the reader, take a look at https://ifttt.com/ and learn how to “put the web to work for you.” I currently have it copying my favorited RSS feed entries into an Evernote notebook. (Among other things.) I used to use another service, but they went out of business.
I started using the plugins for Google Chrome called Web Clipper and Clearly. They make a huge difference when you are collecting research on the web.
I reached a new level of notes when I crossed the 2,000 – 2,500 point. I noticed I was using fewer tags, and so I used the desktop client to remove all tags from all notes in all notebooks. The desktop client asked “are you sure” and I said “do it.” “Click” – processing – “Done” Followed by something like “Whoa” being said by me.
I, as of this writing only have seven tags. Mostly for stuff I am working on at the moment. I have over 3,600 notes. I have never exceeded the upload limit. In 2013, I decided I would upgrade my account to the paid version.
Every once and a while I look through the Evernote Blog for ideas or just common sense things that I haven’t tried. http://blog.evernote.com/
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My tips for those starting out with Evernote:
- Create your notes, don’t worry about tags or notebooks for the first month or so
- Create your notes, don’t worry about tags or notebooks for the first month or so (2nd listing for emphasis)
- Don’t take it so seriously.
- Learn how to email yourself text/small to medium sized images
- Be aware of your account limit and when it resets. (Don’t send yourself full sized photos of something or you may use up all your bandwidth for the cycle.)
- Know that any note can be moved at any time to any notebook. Any tag can be added or removed from a note. Don’t stress about the organization in the beginning that is what the search is for.
- Learn how to search and how to think around the box. (You may not be able to find a result for “box” then look for “container”, or if you know about when you created the note you can search in a time frame.)
- Unless you delete something, it is there, somewhere. (Unless you deliberately remove the items in the trash. Then you have to recover them using the web interface or desktop app.)
- Visit the Evernote blog once and a while. You might get an idea or learn something.
- Don’t be afraid to get lost in the help area.
- Don’t take it so seriously.
[ What's in a Name? ] 