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Tagging Strategies

Subscriber only lesson.

About this lesson

Since it’s very easy to have more tags than necessary, it’s important to develop a strategy that you follow when tagging your Notes.

Exercise files

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Tagging Strategies.docx
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Topic

Tagging Strategies.

When to use

Since it’s very easy to have more tags than necessary, it’s important to develop a strategy that you follow when tagging your Notes.

Instructions

If you’re a new Evernote user, it might take a bit of experimentation to figure out a tagging strategy that works for you. But don’t be afraid to experiment. Your goal is to make your strategy natural to follow and easy to remember.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

Sample Strategy 1: General-to-Specific.

You’ll find this strategy useful if you decide to tag your Notes with a series of tags from a more general category to more specific description(s).

For example:

General category: travel.

Subcategory: greece

Nature of the note: sightseeing

Description: vacation

This way depending on the type of information you are looking for, you’ll be able to run more general or more specific searches.

Sample Strategy 2: Special characters.

Evernote will allow you to use special characters like period, semicolon, caret, etc. You can use them to specify collections of tags. This will help you to organize your tags as well as save you time when tagging a Note, because when you start typing the name of the tag, Evernote will narrow down for you the list of tags you are looking for when suggesting matches.

For example:

:who
.family
greg
mark
mindy
.business
lindsey
paola
fred
.network
!projects
^resources

You should follow a certain logic when adding tags. Trying to remember the name of the tag, especially once you have dozens of them, might be a challenging task. But if you use logic, your logic, you’ll be able to deduce or guess what tag you must have used to tag a note. Make things easy for your future self!

Practical advice:

Be thoughtful about which Notes to tag. You don’t have to tag every single Note you add to Evernote, especially if you use both Notebooks and tags to organize it. As long as it’s easy for you to find the necessary Note, you are good.
Decide whether you’ll be using singular or plural forms for tags. It’s very easy to end up with the same tag, but different forms of the noun. If you make a decision early on what form you use, you save yourself lots of headaches down the line.
Decide whether you’ll be capitalizing the first letter of your tags or not. This is not as critical as using plural vs singular forms because Evernote will not let you have two identical tags. But from an esthetic point of view, it’s best that you style your tags in the same way.

00:04 In the last lesson we talked about the fact that it's rather easy to create
00:08 new tags.
00:10 Which makes it easy to end up with more tags than necessary and
00:14 that's something you want to try to avoid because if you have unnecessary tags
00:19 you will not be able to rely on those tags or it will be difficult for
00:24 you to find what you're looking for.
00:27 That's why it's very important for
00:29 you to develop a strategy that you follow consistently when tagging your notes.
00:35 So in this lesson, I'm going to show you a couple of strategies and
00:40 you can play with them and see what will work.
00:43 And you will experiment even further to create a strategy that's natural for
00:48 you to follow and easy to remember.
00:51 So here is a couple of examples.
00:54 You can tell your notes going from general to specific,
00:59 which might look like this, say.
01:01 Travel, Greece, vacation.
01:07 I can have a different note that's tagged travel, Greece, business.
01:12 So you can see that with every single tag I'm adding a level of specificity.
01:18 Which will make it easy for
01:21 me to find what I'm looking for, because I can run more general or
01:26 more specific searches depending on what I'm looking for.
01:31 Another strategy is to use special characters.
01:35 Evernote allows you to use.
01:38 A number of special characters so you can play and see what would work for you.
01:44 You can select the character that you like.
01:47 But what's great about that is that first of all
01:51 tags that start with a character are listed at the top.
01:55 And since Evernote will rearrange only
02:00 the tags that start with the letter and put them alphabetically.
02:04 When you start,
02:06 when you create a tagging structure where main categories start with a character.
02:12 This structure will stay intact, Evernote will not change it.
02:18 So here you can see that I have an example, where I have a few
02:23 categories that start with the character.
02:28 And you remember that we can nest one tag inside another,
02:33 which allows us to create this level also for specificity for tags.
02:39 What's great about using this strategy where a tag starts with a character
02:47 is also that whenever you start typing that tag, if you start with
02:52 the character itself, Evernote will give you much shorter list of options.
02:57 Because it will choose everything that starts with that character so
03:02 it will help you to make less mistakes or
03:07 it will prevent you from adding a tag that you don't need to add.
03:13 So try both strategies see what works for you and then come and
03:18 organize your tags because that's something very easy as well.
03:24 You can simply drag one tag on top of the other.
03:30 And anything that you do not need you can delete.