Evernote Organization

A while back, I wrote about my ongoing process to organize ALL THE THINGS in Evernote (Tag Wrangling in EvernoteArchiving RSS Feeds with EvernoteStorage Space in Evernote, and Evernote). After doing the big tag reorganization last summer, I feel like I’ve come to a pretty comfortable place, so it seems like a good time to update about the structure of my current system.

The nutshell version: moving to a small number of notebooks, and relying on tags and Evernote’s “Search” function is working out really well!

Now, let’s walk through my system in more detail, and how it’s evolved since last summer.

I theory, with this system, I could have used a single notebook – a “Cabinet” where everything lives. Or, maybe two notebooks – the “Cabinet” and an “Inbox” for things that haven’t been tagged yet. That’s a bit too streamlined for me, but I did manage to get rid of a huge number of notebooks. I decided to keep my teaching materials separate from everything else, and also keep my creative projects (mostly fiction writing projects) in their own notebook. I’d originally put most of my remaining notes into a “Cabinet” of things I might want to reference regularly – think recipes, humorous cartoons, immunization records, sheet music, craft patterns, family genealogy records, that sort of thing. Then, there was an “Archive” notebook for things being kept for the sake of record-keeping (receipts, back-up files), and a “Memories” folder for memorabilia.

Over the past few months I’ve made some modifications. I got rid of the “Archive” folder, keeping most of those things in my main “Cabinet.” I expanded my “Teaching Images Cabinet” to include other sorts of materials that I did not create, and am considering using in the future. I expanded my “Memories” to include a wider variety of things. Memorabilia, yes, but also blog posts, personal correspondence I want to keep, photos, etc. I also added a “Teaching Archive” for things like correspondence I want to keep, teaching evaluations, that sort of thing.

Since I have all of my outgoing emails automatically blind carbon copied to Evernote, I created a notebook for temporary correspondence – a place to dump all of my emails for the current semester. I won’t need to keep most of them long-term, but this way I can keep them on hand if I need to reference them. It also saves me time in clearing my “Inbox” folder, since I don’t need to tag a bunch of emails that are going to be deleted.

Finally, I created an “Active” notebook with things I access frequently (bills to be paid, gradebook spreadsheets for current courses), and a “Working Notebook” for groups of notes that I’m in the process of tagging, or evaluating, or sorting in some other way.

Here are my current notebooks:

Current

Right now, the system is working really well. I find things by searching on a combination of tags and automatic file-types assigned by Evernote. For example, let’s say I want to find the Powerpoint one of my Restoration Ecology lectures from last semester. I search for “445GEP 17FA presentations” (the name of the course; the correct semester, and then “presentations” is Evernote’s tag for any note with a Powerpoint file). This will bring up a very short list of just my Restoration Ecology Powerpoints from the Fall, 2017 semester.

One thing worth mentioning is that I did adjust the way I format some of my tags. Originally, I had all my courses tagged with the department and then course number (e.g. GEP445, BIOL115, SCI120). But I found that it was more time consuming to have to always type the entire department code before starting on the actual course number, and by formatting them with the number first, a lot less typing is involved. Now, I just type “44” and Evernote will autofill the rest of “445GEP” (assuming I have no other course that begins with 44. The same is true for semesters . . . Originally, they were organized by semester (FA, SP, SU), and then the year: FA17, SU16, SP18, for example. However, for each year, I only have three possible semesters, so it’s more efficient to start with the year. If I’m looking for a file from the Fall, 2017 semester, typing 17 will pull up three options, whereas FA pulls up a list of all the years in which I’ve taught a Fall class.

The bottom line: I do feel that I am able to find things I need with this system more quickly and efficiently than with my previous one. I still need to do a fair amount of curation – making sure that all notes are appropriately tagged, and perhaps weeding out things over time that I no longer need. But for now, this is working nicely. Much quicker than searching around through notebooks and hoping for the best.

Tag Wrangling in Evernote

I’ve written about Evernote before (Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote, Storage Space in Evernote, and Evernote), and it’s time for an update. I’d been feeling as though my organizational system wasn’t quite working as efficiently as I want it to – I can’t always find things easily when I want them – so I went looking to see how other people are using the program. After being inspired by some Evernote gurus (particularly Michael Hyatt and Thomas Honeyman), I decided to make a HUGE leap, away from notebooks, and to using tags as my primary tool for organizing my notes. With more than 16,000 notes in my system, it’s somewhat daunting to think about making this change, but I’m going to take the plunge anyway.

The main thing that convinced me that tags might be a better method of organizing notes is this: each note can only be placed in a single notebook. So, for example, if I have a notebook for “Blog Posts” and a notebook for the “Introduction to Biology” course I teach, if I’ve written a blog post about teaching that course, I have to choose one or the other. That’s kind of limiting. But I can use as many tags as I like on a single note. Certainly, I have the capacity to do that regardless of which notebook holds any given note, but I was starting to find myself overwhelmed with notebooks. If I can come up with a tagging system that really works, finding notes at will relies on Evernote’s search function, which is pretty kick-ass, actually.

The basic idea is to have an Inbox, and a very small number of “Cabinets” to hold all notes. Then, a hierarchical tagging structure makes it possible to search quickly and efficiently for notes.

So, just for teaching materials, I’m going from this:

To this:

This is something of an oversimplification, but not much . . . especially since the first screenshot shows JUST my teaching notebooks, which represented only about a quarter of my total notebooks.

Of course, the simplification of notebooks will be accompanied by an increase in the number of tags, but probably not hugely more tags, as I’m already in the habit of thoroughly tagging posts for topic. Mostly, I’ll just be adding “descriptor” tags – what type of file is held within the note. Right now, here are the tags I need to wrangle:

Haha, I’ve got my work cut out for me, don’t I? But I think that by committing to using tags to find things, instead of scrounging around for them in notebooks, I’ll be able to find things a lot faster. (I hope so, anyway, because otherwise this switchover will have been a crazy amount of work for not much payoff).

I’ll update on my progress soon!

Evernote

One of the things I struggle with periodically (or perhaps I should say I “refine” periodically) is my organizational strategy for keeping track of things on my computer, particularly teaching materials. I’ve been using Evernote for several years (I adopted the system in November, 2010, and have been using it consistently ever since), and as soon as I started teaching, I set up a system for those materials. I thought I’d share a little bit about the ways it’s working for me, and not working.

Here’s an overview of the system:

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 9.01.31 PM

Basically, I’ve got a notebook stack for each course I teach, and within the stack are notebooks for organizing various materials – a notebook for lectures, one for exams, one for course materials like syllabi, and a notebook for each individual semester I’ve taught the course, where I can archive correspondence I’d like to keep, or materials that I’ve changed significantly since using them in that semester.

So far, this seems to be working pretty well in terms of being able to find things when I need them. The weakest link here is my own negligence about always tagging things and putting them promptly into the correct notebook. But once I do that, it’s pretty easy to navigate instantly to the file that I want.

Originally, when I set this up I also had notebooks for images, but that started to get unwieldy very quickly (in terms of the number of images I was collecting). If I save ALL the photos and diagrams I have pulled off of websites, it gets out of control (I may find hundreds and hundreds of images in a single semester). So instead I’m saving only those that I think might be difficult to find in the future. A photo of a red-tailed hawk? I will always be able to google a replacement. An excellent diagram showing the life cycle of a snail? That might be more difficult to find again, so that’s one I’ll choose to keep.

One thing I may try and play with in the future: right now, when I’m preparing a powerpoint lecture to be delivered, I download it from Evernote, and store it in a folder on my desktop. It would be a lot cleaner, though, if I kept the files in Evernote and worked with them there . . . I may see if I can adjust to this workflow, and see if it makes things easier for me to find. I’m a bit concerned that I might accidentally overwrite a file that I still need . . . then again, that happens sometimes now, with my folder system, and at least in Evernote I would have the benefit of going back through the note’s history and possibly retrieving things I accidentally copied over.

In addition to a stack for each individual course, I have a stack of general refernences – things not tied to a specific course (like general correpondence with the university, letters of recommendation I’ve written for students, things like that). Again, I don’t have too many issues with finding things when I want them.

One thing I would like to get a better handle on is materials that I’ve found (usually on the internet), and am interested in reviewing, but I haven’t made the time yet to do that. Right now, they’re stashed in a few different places (some in Evernote, some in other folders in various places on my hard drive). I think the next thing I tackle will be a reorganization of those.

Anyhow, that’s the system I’m using right now. If anyone else out there is using Evernote in a different way, and has some tips to pass along, I would love to hear them!

Storage Space in Evernote

I remember reading something about you using Evernote, and I was wondering if you ever run out of space to store things? I was thinking about getting into using it. ~ Anonymous

Hi! The short answer is, no – you don’t ever run out of storage space over the long run, but the long answer is slightly more complicated.

The way Evernote handles the issue of space is that you get a certain amount of upload capability per month. With a free account, it’s 60 MB per month, which is a lot of text notes, but if you start uploading images or pdfs, you can use that up pretty quickly. For a paid account ($5 a month), you get 1GB of storage per month, which is, well, rather a lot. Then, at the end of the month, your storage limits reset, so you get another 60 MB or 1 GB of data. If you are just getting started, and want to get a bunch of data uploaded, you could always pay for an account just for a month or two, to get all your things onto their server*, and then continue on with a free account. Because, once you have uploaded something to the server, it’s there until you delete it, and you have unlimited storage space from that perspective. In other words, you’re limited to the amount you can upload in a single month, but ultimately, the storage is unlimited.

I don’t know exactly how much storage space I am using (several GBs; I have a lot of things scanned documents saved as pdfs, so I can throw away the paper copies), but I have about 17,000 individual notes in Evernote, and it works fine. Sometimes, with that many notes, the search function is a little slow, but it’s still WAY faster than if I had to try and find things by navigating through folders as I did before Evernote.

Hopefully this answers your question. 🙂 I genuinely love Evernote and use it every single day, so I would highly recommend it.

*A free way to get around the single month upload limit is that you can put an unlimited number of notes into “local” folders – ones that are not sync’d to Evernote’s servers. It only uses upload space when you put things in a “synchronized” notebook. For me, a big part of Evernote is having the cloud back up so I basically sync everything, but while you’re getting started, if you want to avoid having to pay for an account, you could put notes in a local folder, get them all tagged and organized the way you want them, and then just transfer them slowly, over time, into synchronized notebooks as you get more storage space each month.

Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote

This is my system for archiving and organizing all my Tumblr posts offline. (It could also be used for Facebook, or LJ or any other site that allows you to pull an RSS feed).

Evernote is organizational software I’ve been using for several years, and I love it with the fiery passion of 10,000 suns. It keeps pretty much my entire life organized, with the exception of my calendar. It’s a program for storing documents and files of just about any type, and it allows you to organize them into notebooks (of your designation), and to tag them any way you like. Many types of documents are also text searchable. It is phenomenal. Really. (There are also some other amazing features, like a web clipper that is possibly the best thing on the whole planet, and it’s word processor is good enough that I do all my fiction writing in Evernote, as it’s really easy to organize chapters).

In order to get archive/backup/offline copies of all your future Tumblr posts, first you’ll need to find your Evernote email address. You should be able to find it under “Account Summary,” and it will end in “evernote.com.”

Next, go to Blogtrottr.com, and create a free account there USING THIS EVERNOTE ADDRESS. That part is important. 😀 (Unless you want to bypass Evernote, and just send your posts to your email account. If you have a fab system for organizing emails, this might work, and you wouldn’t need Evernote. But Evernote is wonderful and you want it anyway, so pretend I never said this about emails :D).

Now, in Blogtrottr, just subscribe to the RSS feed.

That’s really all there is to it! Now, all posts that you make will be sent directly into Evernote, where they will be kept on the Evernote servers, and also synced to your harddrive (you can control how often this happens; I have mine set to sync every 15 minutes). Once they’re in Evernote (I have them all dumped into a folder called “Inbox”), you can go in and tag them and organize them to your heart’s content. And edit them. And all hyperlinks and images will be included. (Although sadly, tags are NOT).

Now, like I said, this is only going to work from posts for here on out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some way to pull all your Tumblr posts relatively easily. Tumblr doesn’t have an export feature, to my knowledge, but something like Tumblr2WordPress might be useful? Especially if maybe you actually imported them into a new WP blog that was set up to send posts to Evernote. (You can set up multiple feeds in Blogtrottr).

So, hopefully this helps, and let me know if you have any questions. 🙂

ETA: A couple of things to add – you’ll want to select “Realtime Push” rather than any of the digest settings, so the posts come individually. Also, under email preferences, I have them: “Enabled,” “Show Thumbnails in emails” and “List media files (enclosures) in emails.” And Mail format is: Multipart text/html.