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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.
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Quick reference
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.
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