Tips for organizing notes, notebooks, and tags

Although Evernote makes it easy to search for content, it's a good idea to establish a consistent way to organize and name notes, notebooks, and tags to make it even easier for you and others find what they need.

More about how to organize notes into notebooks

More about how to organize notes with tags

Tips for better note organization

  1. Create a logical notebook structure
  2. Define a set of reusable tags
  3. Establish naming conventions

Create a logical notebook structure

Notebooks can be organized in many different ways, for example: by project title or status, department or group, or customer accounts.

Example:

Group (or Department): Notebook

Description

Human Resources:

New Employee Handbook

Contains a collection of resources shared with the entire company (vacation policies, benefits, company holidays, policies and procedures, org chart, etc.)

Recruiting:

Hiring Manager Resources

Contains content such as interviewing and feedback templates, hiring procedures and job descriptions and is only shared with the Recruiting Team

Product Development:

Project X

Contains notes with specs, designs, meeting notes, and tasks and is shared with each product team

Design:

Branding Assets

Contains logos, images, fonts and is shared with the entire company

Sales and Marketing:

Best Practices

Contains stories and case studies of companies using a product well and is shared with the entire company

Marketing:

Design inspiration

Contains examples of other companies’ good emails, clipped website, campaigns and is shared within the Marketing Team

Define a set of reusable tags

Add searchable tags that reference a company, project status, a task or project owner, or other terms to make it easier to find or filter out content.

Note: Admins of an Evernote Teams account have the ability to create and manage the tags they'd like their users to use.

Examples

Type

Sample tags used

Location

Recruiting:

zurich, tokyo, sf, boston

Status or phase

Task Management:

now, next, completed

Ticket tracking:

new, inprogress, pending, closed

Key person or team

Project Management (person or dept hiring): 

jfk, mlk, marketing

Unique identifier number

Recruiting (job id):

ca-swe-14919, 14919

Software Development (bug or feature spec number):

9984 or fr9984

Department, type, or function

Recruiting:

android, ios, marketing

Common identifier

Recruiting:

ucberkeley, stanford, waterloo

Consulting:

company1, company2, company3

Use an underscore (“_”) to create multi-word tags

Recruiting:

zurich_open, zurich_closed

Establish naming conventions

Naming conventions make it easier for everyone in the company to find and manage content more quickly. For example, you could propose a guideline where each group or department uses their own group code (“MKTG” for “Marketing”, for instance) whenever they create a new notebook title. That code can be used to search for all the notebooks a particular group or department owns.

Examples

  • For notebooks: All notebook titles begin with a one-word prefix for the department or group that owns it. So, all Sales department notebooks, for example, would begin with “Sales:” as in “Sales:Reports”

  • For notes: All meeting-related notes all start with the date in the note title as in “2014-09-05 Weekly PM Meeting”

  • For tags: All tags that refer to a project or release phase begin with an asterisk (*) symbol as in “*alpha”, “*design”, or “*pending”

 

What's the difference between individual tags, shared tags, and team tags?

  • Individual tags: You can create, remove, and edit tags in any individual notebooks you've created. Any tags you no longer need can also be deleted from your account. When you copy an notebook from an individual account to a team account, Evernote creates team tags with the same names, without deleting any existing tags from your individual account.

  • Shared tags: If you've been given edit access in a particular shared notebook, you can add and remove tags in any of the notes in that notebook. When you remove tags from notes in the shared notebook, they aren't deleted from tags listed in the notebook creator's account. Once a tag has been removed from all the notes in a shared notebook, the action is irreversible. You'll need to ask the creator of the notebook to add the tag(s) back into the shared notes.

  • Team tags: You can create and remove tags from notes in any team notebooks you've joined and have edit access to. Only an account admin, however, can go into the admin console and rename or delete tags from the account.

LANGUAGES_PRODUCT

Keywords:

  • business admins
  • business notebooks
  • business notes
  • business tags
  • team admins
  • team notebooks
  • team notes
  • team tags
  • creating new
  • easier to find
  • easier to search
  • evernote business
  • examples
  • naming conventions
  • note titles
  • notebook titles
  • notebooks
  • notes
  • organize
  • organizing
  • tags

Updated

Was this article helpful?

716 out of 1641 found this helpful

Have more questions? Submit a request