Reorganizing Evernote

If you know me, you know that I am in love with Evernote. As a girl who forgets everything, I love that I can dump information into Evernote and not have to remember. Lately though, as I begin to use it more, I’m seeing myself switch in how I organize. I used to love using binders and stacks to house all my information in Evernote.

Lately, that’s changed, however. As life gets crazier, I’ve found myself leaning more and more toward tags. Tags have this great flexibility with them, allowing you to be as specific or as general as you want. And with nested tags, I can get more organized than I can with binders.
Below is a look at how I organized with binders. Back then (looks like it was my junior year of college), I swore off tags. They were complicated, and I didn’t feel the need to keep going back to tag everything.

Everything was like a notebook, every note had a place in a notebook, and every notebook was in a stack. But as I started working on more projects, I realized notebooks didn’t work with the way my brain did. I love making connections from things that don’t have connections. I began making tags so I could connect notes that were in different notebooks.
Fast-forward to September 2016, and I’m finding more and more reason to stick with tags. A lot of my old notes haven’t been processed yet (that’s a project for another time), but now  I’m making sure I actively tag each note I create. Most of mine are work related, but here’s a look at my tagging system at the moment.

As you can see, the new tagging system is very much a work in progress, but by using nested tags, I can add an extra level of organization. For instance, this is what my Laura Teagan tagging system looks like.

 
I feel like tags are like way to almost map my ever forgetful mind. Tags allow me to make connections that probably aren’t even there. As I’m on a quest to become as paperless as possible, tags are becoming more and more important to my process. It’s much easier to tag things and throw everything into one notebook than it is to spend time deciding what notebook a note fits best in. Why pick one when you can pick multiples?
Curious about organizing Evernote with tags instead of notebooks? Share on X
Eventually, my goal is to get to the point where I only need two or three notebooks, one for notes that need a tag added to them, one for notes that have been tagged and processed, and then maybe a few for miscellaneous things.
Do you organize Evernote by tags or notebooks? If you’re looking for a great article that goes into more depth about Evernote tags, read Michael Hyatt’s article here.