Thanks for asking! Let's see:

One of my favorite things about Evernote is that I never feel like I'm stuck in a particular organizational scheme. I change my mind about how to organize things every few months and it's easy to move things around.

Mostly, I don't rely on organization in Evernote; I just search for what I'm looking for. There are some new features coming out soonish that'll make that really nice.

As of the time of this answer, I have about 9,000 notes in my Evernote account divided among 45 notebooks. However, the majority of these notes are in my single, default notebook.

I use the other notebooks to control sharing. I have a "board" stack, for example, which has a notebook for each of the past few board meetings. Each notebook is shared with my board members and management team. I have a notebook called "The Things I Ate" (with about 700 notes) which I share more broadly. You'll never guess what's in it. I have a stack for conferences with a separate notebook for some of the major conferences I attend containing meeting notes, business cards, encounter entries from Hello, etc. I have an "autographs" notebook which has ebooks signed by authors I meet (take a screenshot of the front page in Kindle or iBooks, sign with Skitch). I have other shared notebooks for travel, presentation materials, etc.

In addition to my own notebooks, I have linked about 30 shared notebooks into my account. These are mostly from Evernote coworkers and have things like design assets, status reports, etc. We have an employee directory that's automatically generated as a shared notebook and stored in a Peek-friendly format so people can study up on new names and faces. There's a takeout-menu notebook that somebody keeps updated. The new Activity View on the Mac and Windows desktop clients really helps with shared notebooks by showing me when people update stuff. That's going to get a lot better soon as well.

I don't use many tags. I have a tag called "want" that I slap on things I want to buy; mostly webclips but sometimes pictures from the real world. I have a "travel" tag for quick access to itineraries, travel notes, etc. I had a "@todo" tag, but realized that was a hack and stopped using it. We're just going to make that functionality a first-level feature of the app instead. I have about 20 other tags which I use intermittently. We have users with thousands of tags, so I know I'm not really representative of tag use.

I'd estimate that about 30% of my notes are webclips, 30% are from Food, Hello, Skitch and Penultimate, 20% are typed in text notes, 15% are files and other stuff and 5% are forwarded emails. I think that adds up to 100%.

Hope that helps.

- p

When I first started using Evernote a few years ago, I certainly wasn't using it to its full potential. After playing around with it more though, I believe it's the most important organizational tool I use for my business now.

At first, I would just save recipes I liked or random ideas I'd find online -- turning Evernote into a hodgepodge of things without any real system in place. But then I got serious about my organization and spent some time figuring out what I really needed out of it.

I have plenty of notebooks in Evernote that are relevant to my interests or personal life, but the part I'll share with you is how I've used Evernote to transform my business and ability to be an effective/efficient entrepreneur. I'm building a part-time private practice as a professional counselor, which means there are lots of behind-the-scenes things I have to learn and do in order to be successful. So, here's the 2 things specific to my business' organization:

I have one notebook "stack" (stack = collection of notebooks) titled Career. Within that, I have several notebooks. Here are just a few of them:

• Associations
• Web Design
• Email Templates
• Counseling Docs/Resources
• Ideas/Inspiration
• Legal
• Marketing/Networking
• Office Management Tools
• Praise/Feedback
• Referrals
• Theories/Techniques

For each of these notebooks, I will use the web clipper to save any and everything that applies. For example, I'm not very familiar with Adwords, but feel like I need to learn more about it. So whenever I google it, I use the web clipper to send any relevant sites into my Marketing/Networking notebook (remember, that notebook is within the stack called Career).

For my Referrals notebook, I use the web clipper to save email interactions with the professional contacts I've made. Another really great way I've used this notebook is when receiving people's business cards.

During a meetup recently, I got about 7 business cards from other counselors. Instead of just shoving it away in a folder in my office, I first took pictures of each person's card (using Evernote's camera feature) so that I could create a specific note for each person. And I made extra comments to help me remember particular things about them. So for example: Let's say I met Sally Sue on Jan 13, 2015 and she specializes in Trauma, and I learned that she also has a son in middle school... well... I would title the specific note "Sally Sue 1/13/15 Meet Up", have the picture of her card (the side showing the contact info), then would write specific notes like, "Specialty: Trauma; Doesn't accept insurance; Evening hours; Has son in middle school; (and maybe I'd add a physical description of her to help jog my memory)." Voila!

So this Career stack is the place where I keep up with important resources, info, or inspiration.

However, the next part of my system -- and this has become the most important part because it makes me actually USE all this information I'm storing on Evernote -- is my stack called "Turn Pro" (This is just my own personal nod to the book by Steven Pressfield since it's inspired me to be more focused).

The Career stack has all the stuff, and this Turn Pro stack has all the "do". After reviewing all the different things I needed to do to be successful in my business, I developed specific categories that addressed everything. These categories then became the notebooks in the Turn Pro stack:

• Advertising/SEO/Marketing
• Client Work
• Logistics/Maintenance
• Networking/Referrals
• New Ventures
• Professional Development/Hone My Craft
• Social Media
• Write/Create Content
  
  

Within each of these notebooks, I have a note titled "Running List". This is where I write any ideas or specific tasks I know I need to do for that category/notebook. This gets updated any time something pops in my head. By knowing I have this running list available in every notebook, it helps me not feel compelled to distract myself with every task that pops in my head, since I can trust that I'll get to it eventually.

But how does this all connect to that first Career stack I mentioned? Well, say I'm working on Marketing that day (from the Turn Pro stack). I first go check my "Running List' to see what I need to do. One of the tasks will inevitably be to learn about Adwords. At this point, I could go google about it and fall into a hole of information. OR... I could use that Marketing/Networking notebook from the Career stack to remind myself of the websites I've already clipped/saved about Adwords. So that's what I'd do. I'd review whatever information I already saved for myself from the Career stack, then I'd start working on it. Obviously if I hadn't ever looked it up before, then I would go and google it, but I'd be sure to clip whatever sites I found useful.

So basically, the Turn Pro stack contains the to-do list, while the Career stack contains more of the resources, and they work together seamlessly. (Be aware though that the Career and Turn Pro stacks don't contain the same notebooks -- they each have their own personalities and uses, but there is some overlap, indeed).

Going back to the Turn Pro stack, each notebook in there doesn't necessarily only contain that one note of "Running List". I'll give you an example from the Client Work notebook to explain this. So, first, I have the Running List (which is always my first point of contact in the notebook since it tells me my to-do list for that category), and on that list, it will have the ongoing task of reviewing my caseload and preparing myself for my next session with each client. So what I've done is, within that Client Work notebook, I create a note for each of my clients (using a code name so that it stays confidential). And within each client's note, I write in some things I want to try, some questions I may have, or I may even add some resources that'd be useful for the client.

For example, I was reading a book the other day and read a passage that seemed relevant to my client, so I took a picture with my phone of the passage and added it to that client's note. Another cool thing I've done is, when I'm not on my computer and can only use my phone, I'll leave myself voice notes so that I can avoid typing lots of stuff on my phone. So for some clients, I've got typed out ideas, images, and even voice recordings -- all contained within Evernote, never once needing to leave the program in order to bring it all together. I can't stress how useful this has been for keeping everything in one place instead of having scattered lists everywhere! So for the Client Work notebook, I will have many notes: 1 called Running List, and 1 for each client I'm seeing.

Time Management

The 3rd piece of all of this (I said there was only 2, but I guess I lied), is that my Turn Pro stack is used in conjunction with my calendar (google calendar). I don't mean to imply they are digitally synced in any way though. How it works is this: Whenever I spent time early on brainstorming the business categories that I needed to focus on to build my business, the categories I came up with turned into 2 things:

1. they became the names for the notebooks in the Turn Pro stack
2. they became blocks of time in my calendar

I was lacking a lot of structure, so I got serious and spent time planning out my daily schedule (I work part time in the mornings as a teacher, so I knew I had to use my afternoons to not only see clients, but to also address every category in my business). Eventually, I came up with a good weekly schedule that gave me the time to work on everything I need to. I even gave my self specific time frames for each task. As an example, here's what my Thursday looks like on my schedule:

• 8:30a - 12:30p: teaching
• 1 - 3: professional development
• 3 - 4:30: client work
• 4:30 - 5:30: logistics/maintenance
• 5:30 - 6:30: new ventures

Now obviously I have to take breaks to eat, use the restroom, or maybe I'm seeing a client in the middle of the afternoon, but it's not so much the specific time of day that I do that task that matters -- it's more about ensuring I spend the appropriate duration of time available for the task. Depending on the category, that duration of time can be cut short though. For example, if there isn't much I need to worry about in the Logistics/Maintenance category that week, it's OK if it only takes me 20 minutes. However, if it's something like Networking... or Writing (the 2 things I dread), it's important that I spend the whole time allotted for it, that way I hold myself accountable. Anytime I start working on a new category, I set the timer on my phone so that I know I have to focus intensely until I hear the timer go off.

It's really important to always give yourself the most time to do the things you have to do -- even if it's not the thing you want to do. Most Important Task first. Always. I love to do administrative tasks, like checking emails and filling out spreadsheets... but that's not what will bring me new clients, so I know that I have to focus on marketing and networking more (despite my hatred of it).

I've certainly been more productive and focused since implementing this system. And funny enough, I'm finding myself with more spare time to do things I enjoy. Before getting organized, I would procrastinate and feel guilty for not doing enough... so I'd be a sloth. Now that I know I have limited time to do certain tasks though, I have laser focus and therefore feel at ease when I can shut down my computer and go out and actually enjoy my life!

I know that was a lot of info... but hopefully it was useful (and made sense). Thanks for the question.

When working with clients to setup or revamp their Evernote structure, I impress upon them the importance of understanding the fundamentals of Evernote.

Evernote is a knowledge management tool, not simply a note-taking software. Notes are “knowledge units,” loosely defined as a sum total of information you’ve collected, analyzed and synthesized externally (i.e., there in the Evernote note) on a specific topic you’d like to reference back later. This implies you’ll collect multiple types of information and formats into a single note—text, images, PDFs, audio/video perhaps, etc. into that single note about that specific topic. It’s important to learn about how to merge notes so that you can have less notes with deeper meaning to each knowledge unit.

Obviously, Evernote can be used for many other purposes (e.g., project, task, event, relationship, and other kinds of productivity management), but fundamentally, this is how I see Evernote’s primary purpose.

Tags in Evernote are akin to hashtags on Twitter and other social networks. With some forethought, they create a cross-system taxonomy and ontology (although these overlap greatly, I see them differently) for organizing (gathering together) and filtering out information ad hoc. Tags are very powerful, but need to be used the same way you manage stacks and notebooks; they should be created mindfully and managed with equal care and attention. I suggest creating an index of all your tags in Evernote and what their purposes are: taxonomical (i.e., organizing/filtering) and/or ontological (workflow (steps or milestones along a project path), priority, or some other qualitative metric).

Notes are the individual units of Evernote and can only be held inside notebooks. Stacks can only hold notebooks. Hence, Stacks > Notebooks > Notes > Tags.

That leads us to good names of Evernote Notebooks:

1. Sit down and look at the areas of your life: home, work, health, family, finances, friends, hobbies, etc. These serve as good Notebook names, as long as you have good Tags identified (or note naming protocols) to make reviewing these notebooks easier when trying to reference something specific.
2. Make your Default Notebook your “Inbox” or “.Inbox” (so it orders to the top of your Notebooks list. This serves as a primary capture location throughout your day when things are active and moving quickly. Otherwise, this Notebook should be cleared to empty consistently and frequently.
3. Make Notebook names the major projects you’re working on. Once the projects are completed, you can merge those notes into one or several notes and place them into #4 below.
4. “zArchives” is a helpful Notebook to move notes for which they don’t need to live in your active Notebooks any longer, but you don’t want to get rid of the notes. This is long-term storage (and started with the “z” so it sorts to the bottom of the Notebooks list). I tag all notes in this notebook with “x” and add “-tag:x” to all of my saved searches in Evernote so these archived notes don’t appear in those searches. If I want to find some long-archived note, I can do so easily by searching “notebook:zArchives” (also a saved search in my Evernote account, but no -tag:x filter, of course). This minimizes the notes to a great extent in my active notebooks, for reference and workflow/transactional notes.

Good luck with your notebook naming and tagging!

Hey Ben,

I also was a big Evernote fan in the first years, had 10k+ notes in it regularly, used it to save everything that I cam across and wanted to reference later. There are three main reasons that changed in the last years - and I did find a more than valuable alternative.

The first: Evernote is a bloated mess. I worked with MacBook Pro and it always was a tedius task to have Evernote running, to search for something (it was a guess when the search was finished), to get stuff in an out of the system. It felt like I literally had an Elephant in my office that I had to take care of while working. Often it would took 30sec to just fire up the software or to let it sync initially, most of the time it would slow down my whole system, sometimes to the point of not being able to do anything anymore. I don’t use the last generation of Macs, yes. But I have no trouble like that with any other software.

The second: Leadership went from great - Phil Libin - to mess - who was that guy, again? They started pushing the return on invest with team features that would pop in your face whereever you were (it took me weeks to understand how to get rid of that invitation to team-chat). The UI changed a lot. The first limited the free tier to a level where it was not usable anymore, then they killed the medium plan (“because it was used little”). So no it costs you nearly double the price of the former plan to just get your stuff synced.

The third: As good Evernote is to get things in it is bad in sorting and getting things out. I found myself often with folders of hundreds of unsorted notes, personal writings alongside large chunks of copied text from websites. That you can’t have subfolders in notebooks (everything is in one hierarchy level besides the notebook stacks) and that you can have only around 180 notebooks (we do tags, dear) is a limitation that really increases that problem because it leads to having to many different notes in a singular folder. Tagging does not work for me when there is no tag-untagged-items-routine built in the system. Short version: I really had trouble working productively with Evernote although I got the calming feeling that I had everything in order.

Which is not a good thing for a software that tries to make you more productive.

That said there are things Evernote marvels at: It has the best web picker in the industry. Period. It has a great scanning app companion (scannable). It really works in giving your access to everything on every device in a second although most of it will stay in the cloud (ask Devonthink about that). All great.

I moved away a while ago. First to Devonthink which I never got accustomed to (also due to a really aged UI layout and annoying syncing problems that never ceased).

Then with incredible delight to Notion (http://notion.so) . It´s a young kid on the block, it´s breathtakingly beautiful and amazingly powerful. It has a unlimited hierarchy, inlimited amount of content, it will embed your videos, images and give you rich text snippets for your bookmarks. You can write markdown, if you like, which is faster and clearer. You can insert anything with shortcodes (/video). You can embed files, PDFs, Google Docs or websites inline. You can have columns of content (like on a webpage). You can deal with structured data - which is really huge. Imagine: insert a complete database including file attachments and expanding notes for each entry if you wish within a note that takes literally no time to set up or change later. It will allow you to build the whole system and frontend in a way that is right for you and take not really more time than entering the information manually. It will get a webclipper soon, it will get API soon. It’s 4$ a month and you can invite guests to work with you for free or 8$ for teams.

For me this is the software I was waiting for. It’s a while since I was that in love with something IT.

I'm using various Evernote-based or Evernote-integrated products in my daily workflow:

• EMails: If the content of the email is worth keeping, I'm saving the email in Evernote, using Boxer's or Airmail's built-in integration (I could also simply forward)
• Research documents and presentations: I have a print-to-PDF-and safe-to-Evernote workflow installed on Mac OS X that applies to all applications. PDFs can be viewed inline in Evernote, without launching Word or PowerPoint.
• Tasks: I'm using Gneo on iPhone and iPad as a simple task manager to keep track of personal todo items. Everything related to development is either going to aha.io or our issue tracker, however
• Thoughts and scribbles: I'm using Evernote's document camera multiple times a day to capture meeting notes and small charts and graphs that our data scientists create during discussions, so that I can leave them with the paper, and that I myself can keep the digital copy
• Design and UI feedback: I'm taking multiple screenshots a day using Skitch, then annotate them and attach the annotated screenshot to Emails, issues or show them in screen sharing.
• Meeting customers and partners: I'm using Evernote's business card scanner and LinkedIn integration, which automatically adds the contacts to my address book and makes following up easy.

This is how I'm using Evernote, but how does it make my life easier?

1. Everything is searchable: Text notes, word documents, powerpoint documents, PDF documents are easy. Screen shots from Skitch are really useful. Text extraction from hand-written notes or business cards are really impressive.
2. I don't have to remember everything, because Evernote does. I can simply rest in the knowledge that Evernote has my back and that I can search the fast archive of knowledge that I am building.
3. Topic-based organization: From time to time, I'm tagging my notes "Product Management", "Product Strategy", "Competition", "Customers", so that I can build knowledge bases for specific areas of my work
4. Discovering related stuff: Whenever I look at a note, Evernote shows related notes, remembering me of things that I did not even think of searching for, giving me additional hints and ideas.

All in all, Evernote is quite substantial to my daily workflow and the premium subscription is one of the best investments made.

Evernote is whatever you, as the user, want it to be. It happens to be my most important app outside the Google ecosystem.

“Piece of paper” repository

I hate quickly scribbling something important down on some random piece of paper, and then, at some subsequent point when I need that info, I can’t find that piece of paper. A “piece of paper” is a terrible storage medium - pieces of paper want to go missing, and that information is lost forever.

As soon as I finish scribbling, I take an image note of the piece of paper and save it with a tag called “piece of paper”.

And, if I come across pieces of paper around the house that has some information on it that looks like someone will need it at some time, I take a picture of it.

Email

You can email content into your Evernote. So, if you receive, say, a flight itinerary by email, you can forward it to your Evernote. Sure, you have the information in your email, but if you are pulling together a broad set of data about a trip (flight, hotel, hot spots to visit, as well as your passport and other documentation) having it all in one place (Evernote) becomes quite helpful.

Web Clipper

The Web Clipper is a big deal for what I do, enabling me to capture web content that I later curate with annotations and links to other notes on a given subject, building up an annotated list of works.

Another cool aspect of this, if you set it up to do so, is that when you do a Google search, Google will also present notes you have in your Evernote that are related to that search.

Links

As you build up content within Evernote, linking related notes becomes a handy way to quick bounce from one note to another that are in a relationship of some sort.

The process of linking like notes, especially if you also annotate the notes with additional comments, enhances retention of the content. This supports Evernote becoming a “second brain.”

Published Notebook

You can create a link to a notebook that anyone can view, whether they have Evernote or not. As such, the notebook can be a sort of public resource, if you curate content that would be of interest to a community.

Take away

Evernote is like a “second brain” - it’s a great tool for building up a repository of information that is searchable in order to find what you’re looking for relatively quickly. The more you throw into it, the more use applications you’ll find for it.

I’m a big fan. Hope you find it useful.

The better question is what do I NOT use Evernote for at this point! Evernote has increased my productivity x10 and I don’t even know most hacks with it. But how do I use Evernote?

The first way I use Evernote is by hooking up my Evernote email (which can be found by going to your settings and then scrolling down) to all the newsletters that I really want to follow and read. This helps clean out my inbox for more important emails from clients and such.

I also use Evernote as an alternative to Pocket. I love Pocket but I don’t like having so many applications to manage. I try to keep my life as simple as possible and saving all articles I want to save for later via Evernote allows me to do just that.

The other way I use Evernote is as a personal journal for my thoughts. I meditate via breathing exercises daily but sometimes I have so much on my mind that I need to rant. So instead of annoying and wasting someone else's time and energy I unleash all my thoughts via a private Evernote notebook. This helps me have a clear mind at all times and destress.

I use Evernote as a way to write out all my rough drafts of blog posts, some Quora posts, and proposals for potential clients. Again keeping everything under one roof seems to keep my life very simple.

Pseudo code. Yeah that’s right I sometimes use Evernote to write out all the steps that I will take to create a project/app. This helps me visualize situations and the application much more efficiently. I find that writing out my project/application in plan english reduces the amount of bugs and headaches I have when I start coding.

Daily Planner & Reminders. Evernote is also the one of two main ways that I organize my personal life and daily tasks.

What Evernote is missing really depends on how you're using it. I mostly use Evernote as digital filing cabinet for a (nearly) paperless life. In this use case my largest gripe with Evernote is the lack of any structured data. I'd love to be able to add a price field to my receipts notebook or presenter and conference fields to my presentations notebook. Tags and hacking around with naming conventions only get one so far. For similar reasons it would be great to have per notebook settings for sort order and display.

Beyond the use case described above I think Evernote is missing a massive opportunity by not opening up user's public notes to browsing and search. I think they have the opportunity to outdo services such as Pinterest if they were to execute the idea well.

Evernote is an amazing way to share stuff - as you probably know you can share as 'read only', give your users editing permissions, and give permission for them to invite others to read your notes. Or you can share a 'public link' which allows anyone to view (but not change) your pages, and invite others.

Evernote isn't designed as website management software, so you may find it lacking in some features if you want to use it for a 'public' website. However since the basic free version allows you to full access to sharing, you can test things out carefully (always a good plan) before you try to stun the world with your fantastic content.

There are several things to bear in mind if you're sharing to others - jumping from one note to the next, you'll need to provide a way for your users to get to the next page, or back to your 'home' page. There's also no built-in index or page listing - although Evernote's "table of contents" feature means you can easily create one, with links to all your pages.

That's all an introduction to answering your question, which is that surprisingly (and AFAIK) there's no central website listing Evernote public shares. A few have popped up from time to time, but don't seem to last, mainly because (I think) Evernote has been used to share between individuals, families (we have two shared notebooks) and small groups, but not particularly to the world at large. All the other options - social media, cheap websites, blog software and so on are so well promoted that it either hasn't occurred to folks, they weren't experienced enough Evernote users, or (quite likely) Evernote was in one of its earlier stages of the sharing feature, and there weren't then enough options and features to encourage them to try.

If you'd like to put something online though, one good choice would be to include a page listing public Evernote shares, starting with your own, and to publicise your list within the Evernote community via the G+, Facebook, Linkedin and other Evernote-related sites and forums.

I don’t use Evernote. But, in the app I use, Quiver, I use notebooks to divide notes by topic or project. Since Quiver allows nested notebooks—basically, they work like folders—my top-level division is between home and work. Within each, I use notebooks to group by topic or project.

Quiver (and Evernote, as I recall) also has tags. I don’t use these as much, but they are handy because they cut across all notebooks. So, if I had a JavaScript notebook in Home and in Work, I could tag all of the notes with “JS” and get to all of them in one view. I rarely do this, but it’s a good idea if you can make tagging part of your workflow.

All of these notes tools are fairly freeform. What one person does with notebooks, another will do with tags. And some will use a mix of both. For me, it’s mostly notebooks/folders and occasionally tags, but that could change. I’m always open to structuring things differently, as there’s no perfect way.

I think you are right - over-tagging is a common problem with Evernote. I used to have hundreds of tags and subconsciously I used to wonder why. They, when I started using Evernote to implement Getting Things Done I took a deep breath and deleted nearly all of them. And it's been fine - because of the search feature.

Now, with GTD and Evernote, around 20 tags are essential plus one for each project and that's about it.

Well, relatively: I have 30 or so extra tags. And I am rigorous about deleting any I can.

The thing is, if you have a lot of them you can't remember if you tag pubs you want to remember in London: "Pubs: London", or "London Pubs". So you end up have different tags with the same purpose. Which somewhat defeats the object.

But it's worth having a tag for that. A search for "pub" will bring up many words containing pub, and London is in lots of notes.

Other tags I find useful are a general Travel tag; Film, and Music for movies and songs to watch/listen to: Brighton dining, London Dining, Sussex dining; Theatre. You can see how those types o fitems would be hard to pull up in a search and be sure you have everything.

But, as I say, I edit viciously, and get by with about 30.

The other thing I do is add extra words into a note that I might search on, when creating it. So I make sure I might make sure I have GTD in a note containing the phrase Getting Things Done. You could have a tag: but I prefer not to.

Cheers

Malc

I've used Evernote on pretty much a daily basis for the last two years.

Every time I read an article that I liked, I saved it to Evernote.

Every time I read an answer on Quora that I found insightful, I saved it to Evernote.

Every time I did a homework assignment (I'm in college), I wrote it first in Evernote, edited and finalized it in Word then saved the final draft to Evernote.

Every time a thought has crossed my mind that I don't want to forget, I saved it to Evernote.

If you haven't noticed where I'm going with this, I saved essentially everything to Evernote.

And now that I'm two years in? I have a vast collection of information I can instantly refer to if I forget anything or if it comes up in a conversation - from politics to school work to my WiFi password to my mom's recipes. It's extremely convenient and I recommend it for everyone.

My general rules for notes -

Everything goes into one notebook unless there’s a very good reason to keep it separate. That means:

• shared notes - to keep my other personal and business notes separate, and to make sure I don’t edit or delete something I shouldn’t
• items for my mobile phone - this is a small subset of my main notes that represents travel documents, meeting notes and general information that I keep with me as ‘offline searchable’
• current projects) - I’ll often keep work in progress stuff temporarily separate from the main body of notes. Just means I have all my reference stuff close to hand.

Everything else is in the default notebook - 90% or so of 39,000 notes.

And.

I have a title for every note (again; unless there’s a very good reason why not..)

My titles are “<date> - <doctype> - <source/supplier> - <amount/ keywd>” and an "intitle:xxx" search will usually find what I need quickly.

Date = purchase/ action date as yyyymmdd (set by phrase express)

Doctype = delivery note / letter / receipt / statement etc

Source = XYZ & Co

Amount/ Keywd = 400.00/ new laptop

Plus.

There’s a thing called ‘curation’ or ‘database gardening’ - amongst other things. Anyone who’s managed a big database will tell you there’s always some tidying up to do, not matter how carefully you may have defined your storage requirements. Every time you or anyone else uses the data you’ll see small things - misspelled names / addresses, incorrect titles etc.

Every time I search, I’m conscious that the results may not be quite what I expect. A search for “intitle:bank statement” forinstance might miss one or more badly copied pages. I’ll do a little more work to find those pages - trying s search by branch address or account number forinstance. If I do have to bring some strays back into the fold with additional searches, I’ll then (and only then) add a tag to all the hits so that of my 20 initial finds and the remaining 8 that I unearthed later, all 28 will come up in future to a search with that tag.

That’s a bit of an overview, but I hope it helps.

Oh - and the most important feature of looking at the ways other people arrange their filing structure? - DO NOT look at the ways other people arrange their filing structure! You need something simple that you can remember and apply consistently and quickly to all notes, but above all you need something which suits the way your workflow goes and your brain works. Don’t feel obliged to adopt any idea until you’ve tried it out and feel happy that it will work for you!!

The best structure for you depends on a couple of things:

1. How you like to organise information (are you more visual or linear?)
2. What you’re using Evernote for

Is it:

• Your go-to space to save anything and everything you need to refer back to
• A personal knowledge management hub
• The home base for your own business’ documents
• A collaborative workspace you use within your company

Each one of those could result in different ways of organising your Evernote - here are a few possibilities:

1. Stacks based on areas of responsibility containing individual notebooks for each aspect that makes it up, e.g. a Marketing stack made up of notebooks such as:
1. Blogging
2. Email marketing
3. Direct outreach
4. Networking (bloggers, media, influencers, etc.)
5. Videos
6. Interviews
7. Contests
8. Webinars
9. Case studies
10. Affiliates
11. Other partnerships
12. Social media

This structure could then be replicated for all of the areas of your business and life.

2. Notebooks exactly matching the names of projects you have organised in your task management tool, enabling you to save your ‘project support’ material quickly and without having to think about where notes should be saved.

So for every project you create in, say, Todoist, you would replicate the project name in an Evernote notebook and save all project-related material in that notebook. These notebooks could be saved in a ‘Projects’ stack.

3. The system I use, informed by GTD and which I discovered through Tiago Forte.

You would create 4 stacks, as follows:

• Projects
• Areas
• Resources
• Archives

The notebooks that make up these stacks are active and fluid. For example when an active project is completed, it would move from the Projects stack to the Archive stack.

For tagging, the key is to:

1. Establish, document (in a note) and follow a clear tagging convention so your tags remain useful and don’t become a burden to maintain - excessive tagging becomes counterproductive
2. Decide whether you’ll be using singular or plural tag names so you don’t end up with overlaps like ‘meeting’ and ‘meetings’
3. Periodically clean up (and merge if necessary) tags that are no longer being used

An example tagging convention might be:

• Area of responsibility (e.g. market research)
• Topic (e.g. blogging, content marketing)
• Format (PDF, table, image, audio, template, URL, bookmark)
• Person/client (Jon Snow, Acme Industries)
• Type of information (email, bank details, address, phone number)
• Year/time period (if relevant e.g. for tax returns/receipts)

There’s also a decision to make about whether you’re a notebook-only, a tag-only or a notebook and tag person. I use both but whichever you choose, you need to be certain that you’ve chosen a system you’re willing to maintain otherwise it’ll become an information graveyard.

Hope that gives you a few ideas!

Tags are a useful way of organizing a series of notes into a sub-topic, where each note in the sub-topic does not contain a word that would pop up in a notebook-wide search. They are also useful for tracking information that is spread across multiple notebooks.

A past Evernote podcast addressed this topic directly, and the hosts described tags as being useful for organizing information within topics that aren't broad enough to require their own notebook. Think 'vegetarian' for notes within a Recipes notebook, or 'Expenses' for documents you might use to put together an expense report from within a Work notebook.

If you were gathering information about tablet computers, your notes would have words like "iPad" and "Playbook" and "Galaxy Tab" in them -- but not necessarily a word like "tablet" that would ensure they all pop up in every search. A search for 'tablet' might also bring up false positives -- a doctor's note instructing you to take two tablets a day of a particular medication, for example.

Tags allow you to review all of your notes at on a given subject at once, or see them at a glance. In the above example, by adding the tag 'tablet' to your notes on the iPad and its competitors, you will then be able to click the tag in Evernote's sidebar and all your associated notes will materialize for easy scanning.

That said: There's no reason to create tags for topics you don't regularly return to, and creating a glut of them will clutter up your sidebar. As with most software, the fewer tags you can get away with using, the better.

I hardly use notebooks at all. I have To Do, Filing, Templates, and Completed. That's it. I do all my categorisation by tag and by the keywords in the entry. If I think it necessary, I add extra words I may search on into the entry.

When I swapped my Evernote to using The Secret Weapon system (a lovely GTD system) I bit the bullet and deleted a couple of hundred tags I'd been using and leaving around a dozen.

The sky didn't fall in. Evernote search does nearly all I want. I now have a tag for each active project too - as per The Secret Weapon. So now I have maybe 50 tags and I am cautious about adding each new one I add.

I am a former employee of Evernote, and still an user of the service.

There are several aspects of Evernote service. You have already realized that Evernote is something you can put info into so that you can pull that out whenever you need it. If you can recognize such a need in your life, please start using it for the need. Still you should try to use it for one purpose initially. If you try to do everything with it, you may be overwhelmed. Once you are comfortable with one thing, you can start using it for other things.

If you ask me how I use it, I would have to say this way. There are many service to organize your everyday life. You can use photo organization/storage service, email service, file sharing, etc for a particular type of information. They will help you really well for a specific purpose. However, we have so many other info in our hand. They don’t come in one shape. You may want to remember a quote from a web page. Or you may just take a screenshot. Or you may have to capture a pdf file…. Often, you don’t even know if you need to keep them. Evernote is really good at that. Whenever I have a piece of information that I may or may not need down the road, I put it into Evernote. You must have a bunch of papers on your desk that you don’t know what to do. Those critter your desktop. Then, those are exactly the information that you want to have in Evernote so that your desk is kept clean.

Let me suggest using Evernote through a chatbot. If you’re used to using Facebook Messenger, I’ve created a free chatbot that lets you connect to your Evernote account, list your notes, create new ones and search your notes.

The reason this is a cool way to use Evernote is that it’s faster. If you already use Messenger, it’s probably already conveniently located on your home screen, and creating a note is as quick as sending a photo or text to the bot. The bot gives you options to add labels, a title, etc., but if you just send it something and then put your phone in your pocket, it will create a new note after a little while!

The search feature is also pretty cool - it uses Evernote’s search, but if (and only if) that comes up empty, this bot uses a cool semantic search to guess which notes you’re looking for, based on labels you’ve given your notes. So, if you have a note labeled “salmon recipe”, and you search for “fish”, Evernote won’t find it - but this bot will!

It’s free, so give it a try: Tags, and tap “Message” to start.

I'm a newer Evernote user (but long-time pen-and-paper geek and user of NValt). My mother-in-law bought me the Evernote Moleskine notebook and it's a geek trifecta gift: nice paper, digital-nicity, and something I wasn't previously aware of.

I'm finding that the page capture is pretty much what's on the tin: the little dots let the app straighten out your images a bit (example: útilware • Did you know?) and clean up the contrast, but otherwise are not that distinguishable from any other capture. The stickers, while technically nifty, haven't done much for me. If they could create one that inserts a 'to-do', that'd be useful.

All that said, knowing that I have a three-month premium subscription is oddly drawing me back into my notebook rather than being all digital all the time, which is a larger goal which I'm chasing in life anyway, so that's helpful.

When this notebook runs out, the jury is still out regarding whether I'll purchase another Evernote Moleskine, or just go with a standard notebook. For the moment, I'll be tempted to continue with the Evernote one, if only for the interesting embossed cover (which at least 1-2 people have commented on already).

Method 1 of 2:Sharing a Notebook in OneNote for Windows 10

You'll find OneNote in your Start Menu.

2. Click Share.

You'll find this in the upper right corner of the app and a menu will dropdown.

If you don't see the button here, you might be using the OneNote 2016 version instead.

3. Click to select This notebook.

You'll want to make sure is selected so your invitees have access to everything.

If you don't see a drop-down, that's fine. Your notebook should be selected as default.

4. Enter email addresses with whom to share your notebook.

You can add one email address or multiple.

You can use the drop-down menu below the email addresses to give users certain permissions. You can select if you want them to be able to make changes to the notebook, or to make it read-only.

You can also click next to a shared person to change their privileges or remove them from the shared document entirely.

5. Click Share when you're ready to share the document.

You can add more people to the share list if you need to.

Method 2 of 2:Sharing a Notebook in OneNote 2016 or OneNote for Mac
1. Save your OneNote document in OneDrive.

OneDrive is a cloud storage service offered by Microsoft that will enable you to be able to share your pages. This method also works for Macs.

In OneNote, click the menu and select . If you already see a OneDrive option, skip these steps.

Click and .

Enter your OneDrive or Microsoft account username and password, which could be an email address.

Select , name your notebook, and click .

2. Open your OneNote notebook.

You'll find this in your Start Menu.

3. Click File.

You'll find this on the editing ribbon above your document.

4. Click Share.

You'll find this near the bottom of the menu, above Export.

5. Click Share with People.

You'll see this on the right side of the page panel under the header.

You can also get a link to the notebook that you can send in a chat or email by clicking instead. You'll need to choose to activate sharing the notebook with a link.

6. Enter email addresses with whom to share your notebook.

You can add one email address or multiple in the text field under the header.

The drop-down menu next to their email address gives them certain permissions. You can select if you want them to be able to make changes to the notebook or if you don't want them to be able to make changes.

7. Enter an email body if you want to customize the message.

A default message will be sent if you don't want to customize it.

8. Click Share when you're ready to share the document.

The people you're sharing with will get an email invitation to view the document.

There aren't 8 "must have" notebooks that I'm aware of - the structure of your database can be literally anything, depending on whether you're indexing a beer-mat collection or running a company.

You're only required (by Evernote) to have two Admin notebooks -

• The Default - this can be any notebook name, but one notebook must be assigned to the 'default' status. This is where your clips and notes go if Evernote doesn't have any specific instructions what else to do with them. Most folks seem to call this an Inbox note and go through it regularly to assign notes elsewhere.
• The Trash - where notes go when they die; you can (and IMHO should) empty the trash regularly. I do know some folks who leave the trash files where they are "in case" they were wrong to delete some information. A big trash notebook though can slow your system down and bloat the database size.

You may get

• A 'Shared with Me' section in your account if anyone shares notebooks with you, or if you import a shared notebook from a website. Copy the notes from that notebook into your own account if you wish.
• A 'Conflicting Changes' notebook if one or more note(s) sync with the database and Evernote is unable to decide which should take precedence. Both notes are saved - it's up to the user to decide how to deal with the conflict.
• An 'imported notes' notebook if you import notes from an ENEX backup copy of a notebook. This is to avoid conflicts with any copies of the same notes which might exist in your database.

I'd strongly recommend you add a

• Shared With Others notebook (or Stack) to hold any notes or notebooks that you have provided to others. It means you can find those notes easily if someone asks for explanations or changes, and it avoids the possibility that anyone edits or deletes those notes while they're still being used by someone else.
• Projects stack + individual notebooks for any projects you may have ongoing: from launching the new website to painting a bedroom
• Contacts stack - to allocate a notebook to every company and individual that you deal with so that if you want to wonder what Wanda said in her last report, you simply have to go to that notebook to find it. That kinda breaks the 'open plan' setup of Evernote, but I find it really easy to administer - and if you have thousands of notes, this division into projects and people means that at worst you only have to look through a few tens or hundreds of notes to find a match, rather than the full database. And it's a lot quicker.(Sadly my largest notebook is for Amazon - given the number of household purchases we make!)

Keep links to your notes, notebooks and stacks in the Shortcuts/ Favourites section of your app (where you can) for more rapid access.

YMMV

Obviously your mileage will vary - it depends on whether you're using the notes for study, research or writing a book.

Don't worry - create all the notebooks you want. You can always tie them back into a better scheme of things later. The most important thing now is (usually) 'make sure you can find the things you're filing away again quickly' - it's always possible to tidy them up later.

I've gone from having most of my notes (around 52,000) in one notebook and surviving on tags and searches (but losing things occasionally) to having the same number of notes in about 270 notebooks.

It's taken me 10+ years to get to this state, but I'm (finally) feeling as though I know exactly where every nugget of information should go so that it can be found again quickly... well, it's worked so far anyway!

Method 1 of 2:Sharing a Notebook in OneNote for Windows 10
1. Open your OneNote notebook.

You'll find OneNote in your Start Menu.

2. Click Share.

You'll find this in the upper right corner of the app and a menu will dropdown.

If you don't see the button here, you might be using the OneNote 2016 version instead.

3. Click to select This notebook.

You'll want to make sure is selected so your invitees have access to everything.

If you don't see a drop-down, that's fine. Your notebook should be selected as default.

4. Enter email addresses with whom to share your notebook.

You can add one email address or multiple.

You can use the drop-down menu below the email addresses to give users certain permissions. You can select if you want them to be able to make changes to the notebook, or to make it read-only.

You can also click next to a shared person to change their privileges or remove them from the shared document entirely.

5. Click Share when you're ready to share the document.

You can add more people to the share list if you need to.

Method 2 of 2:Sharing a Notebook in OneNote 2016 or OneNote for Mac
1. Save your OneNote document in OneDrive.

OneDrive is a cloud storage service offered by Microsoft that will enable you to be able to share your pages. This method also works for Macs.

In OneNote, click the menu and select . If you already see a OneDrive option, skip these steps.

Click and .

Enter your OneDrive or Microsoft account username and password, which could be an email address.

Select , name your notebook, and click .

2. Open your OneNote notebook.

You'll find this in your Start Menu.

3. Click File.

You'll find this on the editing ribbon above your document.

4. Click Share.

You'll find this near the bottom of the menu, above Export.

5. Click Share with People.

You'll see this on the right side of the page panel under the header.

You can also get a link to the notebook that you can send in a chat or email by clicking instead. You'll need to choose to activate sharing the notebook with a link.

6. Enter email addresses with whom to share your notebook.

You can add one email address or multiple in the text field under the header.

The drop-down menu next to their email address gives them certain permissions. You can select if you want them to be able to make changes to the notebook or if you don't want them to be able to make changes.

7. Enter an email body if you want to customize the message.

A default message will be sent if you don't want to customize it.

8. Click Share when you're ready to share the document.

The people you're sharing with will get an email invitation to view the document.

The main thing to remember is that notebooks are "containers" whereas tags are, well, tags (or "labels" if that makes more sense). A note must exist in one and only one notebook but can have as many tags as you want. The upshot of this is that notebooks in general need to be exclusive -- a note belongs either to notebook1 or notebook2, but cannot by definition belong to both, so if you have clear non-overlapping areas those are great candidates for notebooks.

Personally, I have my catch-all "Personal" notebook, then a notebook for each company I've worked for. This allows me to limit the scope of my searches easily enough -- I'm either in my "personal notes" world or in my "current employer's notes" world just by specifying the notebook ("notebook:Personal") in my search -- and ignoring all of the other notes in my account. Then I have cross-cutting tags used in all of those notebooks -- some GTD-style "ARCHIVE"/"TODAY"/"VIEWLATER" type tags, some tags to tie together things that belong to the same project, some tags for bills / car-stuff / taxes-2012 / house-stuff etc.

For work, this type of system works especially well. Take, for example, a note capturing thoughts from a work meeting that touches on multiple projects. Adding a tag for each project is trivial, whereas if you had a notebook-per-project setup you'd have to create multiple notes and juggle them while in the meeting.

In general, I don't get too caught up with tagging (other than the GTD tags). If I miss something, the search facilities in Evernote are generally sufficient to pull them back in to view when I need them, and the recently released related notes functionality is also working to keep notes from being lost in the pile.

One other thing to note: Evernote allows you to share notes at either the note level or notebook level, so if you want to share a group of notes and be able to add more notes to that shared group easily, you'll want to set them up to live in one notebook.

Hope this helps,

-- Tom