Redesigning my Evernote – 1 – Basics

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EvernoteAs mentioned in my post “To cloud or not to cloud“, I am trying to figure out if the switch to Evernote from OpenKM will work out for me. One incident that has pushed me to pursue this further, is the recent downtime of my server. The downtime was caused due to getting a new IP address, and as I was on holiday at the time, there was nothing I could do about it, as I was not able to reach anything at home. Now, if you suddenly want, or need, to look something up, this is not a very handy situation.

So, I am thinking that I want to make the switch, however: there is stuff to plan. As mentioned before, my current folder/organizational structure looks a bit like this:

  • Me
    • Company1
      • 2014
    • Company2
      • 2014
        • Bills
        • Correspondence
    • Company##
  • Evelien
    • Company##
      • 2014
  • Shared
    • Company##
      • 2014

Well, I think you get how it goes. So, this then begs the question: what would be the best way to convert this into an Evernote system that works, for me.

Evernote does not support directories as such, but you can create “Notebook stacks“. An important thing to consider is that Evernote only allows a stack to be one level deep. This basically means that I cannot recreate the exact same structure as I have now in notebook stacks, but need to create a different structure. Tags, on the other hand, work a bit differently, in the sense that you can create tags and child tags, which can go deeper than just one level. in fact, I do not know what the limit is, but you can go at least 10 levels deep (that’s when I stopped trying 😉 ).

Considering the above, it comes down to one of two ways of doing it:

  1. A notebook per company and then use the year as (one of the) tags
  2. I could make a notebook per year and then a tag per company

So, that would mean that you would either get:

  • Me
    • Company1
    • Company2
    • Company##
  • Evelien
    • Company##
  • Shared
    • Company##

or

  • Me
    • 2013
    • 2014
    • 20xx
  • Evelien
    • 20xx
  • Shared
    • 20xx

The first means that I can have an overview per company, and use tags for, among others, the year and type of note. The second means that I will have all notes together, and that I will use a tag for the company and the type of correspondence. Now, this decision seems like a simple one, but, after some research, has some serious implications on the usage.

When researching notebook stacks and the possibility of sharing them, I found out that it is only possible to share individual notebooks, but not notebook stacks. Now, suppose that I would want to share all the information with Evelien, that would mean that I would have to share ALL the Company## notebooks with her, one by one, when using the first option for the organization, whereas, in the second option, I would only need to share the notebook for the year. Of course, this is all hypothetical, as Evelien is not using Evernote, yet, at the moment, but maybe I can persuade her. 🙂

Anyhow, this is one of the things I am considering before making the full switch over to Evernote. This is the most important decision though, because the choice I make here, will influence all further options.

FYI: At the moment, I am more leaning towards the year-based organization, as it seems “easier”, but tagging will have a huge impact, so I will need to figure something out for that as well. But that will be for another post.

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