Some Reflections on Evernote and MyInfo

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 20, 2011 at 08:55 PM

WSP wrote:
>creating a tag for each individual would
>produce an intolerably long list of tags, especially since EN forces us to put all
>notebooks into a single file. In MyInfo I can separate my family notes from other kinds
>of notes very easily (and then search across more than one file if I wish), but in EN the
>tags of all those combined notebooks can quickly get out of control. I have thousands
>of notes in EN (mainly a legacy from using earlier versions of it), and my tag list is
>already stupefying large.

Our situation is actually not very different: I use Evernote for both professional and private items. I have copied as tags all the folder hierarchies I have used in other systems (file system and PIMs) for compatibility, so I too have a very large number of tags. My solution is the following:

- Tags: organised hierarchically within separate ‘superfolders’ representing major areas e.g. work, personal, family etc. The superfolder names, as well as those of the tags themselves, begin with a special character depending on the area; ‘!’ for personal, ‘$’ for work, ‘^’ for family… These characters are quite intuitive for me, and also sort nicely.

- Notebooks: separate notebooks (actually notebook ‘stacks’) for each area, with the same naming conventions as above.

I don’t mind that EN keeps all notebooks in one file; I just expand only the stacks that I am using. I can then select to search/filter only within those.