A while back, I wrote about my ongoing process to organize ALL THE THINGS in Evernote (Tag Wrangling in Evernote, Archiving RSS Feeds with Evernote, Storage 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:

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.