My Tips for Organizing and Searching with Evernote

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share some tips for organizing your notes and making them easily searchable in Evernote.

I use Evernote as my main note-taking app.  I've done a couple of videos about Evernote, but in this one, I want to talk specifically about organizing and finding notes.  First -- a quick overview on how Evernote structures itself organizationally.  The primary organizational unit for Evernote is the 

Notebook

Notebooks should contain broad topics.  You can add as many as you want, but I think you should limit the number you have or it will be unwieldy.  Obviously, if you are just starting out, you aren't going to have any notes yet, but my rule of thumb is that each notebook should contain at least 100 notes.  If you don't ever think you'll put that many notes in a notebook, it's probably not notebook worthy.  The 6 notebooks I have are: Books & Reading, Grad School, YouTube, Recipes, Kid's Activities, and Lara's Brain.  The secondary organization unit is a 

Tag

Although notebooks are physical locations for notes -- a note can only be in one notebook -- tags are logical organizational tools.  In other words, notes can have multiple tags, each of which is searchable.  I find logical organization to be much more flexible for searching and organizing notes.  For example, I took some notes on the debit cards that I use for allowance for my kids.  I've tagged this note with multiple tags: Finances, How To, and Kids.  So this note will come up if I search for any of these tags.  Here — see here it is if I search for Finances.  If I search for another tag, it'll only give the results for those notes that have both tags, so it can be a powerful search tool.  You can create a tag as easily as typing into the Tag area up here in the note.  My rule of thumb is that you should have at least 10 notes to warrant the creation of a tag.  You can also create 

Subtags

but you can only do this in the desktop version of Evernote -- those tags nest visually underneath the primary tag.  You create a subtag by right clicking on primary tag and choosing to "Create a tag in _____".  I love the idea of Subtags, but the execution by Evernote leaves much to be desired from my standpoint.  For example, I have a bunch of subtags under Recipes.  These are tags that I only use in the Recipe notebook and I don't want them scattered in among my other tags -- I want them to be separated out.  So, in the PC software they nest under this primary tag and I can hide them if I want.  Perfect.  The problem is that this subtag concept does not translate over to the iPad or iPhone app, which is where I use Evernote most frequently.  For example, even though I've created this subtag "Sample" under Recipes, in the iPad app, it just gets scattered in with the rest of the tags.  For this reason, I created my own organizational tool

Grouping

You may have noticed that each of these recipe subtags has an "R" in front of it.  That's because even outside of the PC software, I want all of those Recipe exclusive tags to be grouped together.  I can make this happen by putting a small "R" (for recipe) in front of each one.  That way, they all show up together even on the iPad and iPhone apps.  I do the same things for all of the tags that I use exclusively in my Books and Reading notebook and for those I use in my YouTube notebook.  

These are all ways to organize your notes, but the main reason for having good organization is so that you can find your notes again later.   The final tool for doing that is creating a good

Title

Creating a good title is important if you want to be able to locate your note later.  I try to think of all of the terms that I might think of later when I am trying to find this note.  It doesn't always make for the best syntax, but I throw all of the terms in there.  I don't really care if the title is long.  For example, I make notes on which school picture package that I order each year for my kids so that I don't have to do that mental exercise each year.  I could search for school picture, or photos, or the name of the organization that sells the pictures, so my title looks like this.  As I said, not the best grammar, but what do I care as long as I can find it each year!  And finally, 

Search Tricks

When it comes to searching, the iPad and iPhone can't do as much as the PC version.  For iOS, you can search for a term, but you can't differentiate whether that term appears in the title or the body of the note.  So, if I search for "Party" I get some notes where the word party is in the title and some where it's just in the text of the note and they are all mixed in together.  What that means is that I have to parse through more notes to find what I might be looking for.  You can also search by Tag, but only for one for one at a time.  On the PC version, you can search by multiple tags, which we did earlier PLUS, you can use what they call "Advanced Search Operators" to give you lots of options for searching.  To search for notes with the word party only in the title, type "intitle:Party".  You can use these search operators to find notes by the date they were created, what kind of media they have attached to them, and where the note was created.  You can even combine search commands to have more control.  I'll put a link to the full list of search operators in the comments section (https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313828).  

And that's it.  Those are my tips for organizing your Evernote notes and be sure you can find them when you need them.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!