Retired course
This course has been retired and is no longer supported.
About this lesson
Evernote has the potential to become your “external brain,” which makes it extremely important for you to keep your information in Evernote as orderly as possible.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Maintaining Evernote.docx55.5 KB Maintaining Evernote - Solution.docx
56.9 KB
Quick reference
Topic
Maintaining Evernote.
When to use
Evernote has the potential to become your “external brain,” which makes it extremely important for you to keep your information in Evernote as orderly as possible.
Instructions
The fact that Evernote doesn’t force a specific structure on its users is a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you get to create the exact structure that fits your needs and the types of information you are storing. A curse, because you have to be very vigilant to maintain that structure so that Evernote doesn’t become your information graveyard.
.As great as Evernote is, if you can't easily find the information you have saved there, you will stop trusting it. Any tool that you can't trust will frustrate you and prevent you from getting stuff done.
To ensure that Evernote remains a trustworthy tool, two things will have to happen:
1. You must create a structure so that you know exactly where information being added to Evernote should go, and
2. You must maintain your Evernote to catch and properly organize any Notes that you added in a hurry or remove those that you don’t need anymore.
We’ve already talked about different strategies of structuring your Evernote. So, go back to those lessons to decide how to prefer to (re-)structure your Evernote. Yes, the more information you have in your Evernote, the larger a project it will be to restructure it. But if you want Evernote to become your external brain, it’s definitely worth it.
The second piece of the puzzle is maintaining your structure. It can be as simple as blocking 30min/week on your calendar to organize the Notes you added during the week.
This is how your weekly Evernote maintenance session could look:
- Open the Default Notebook and properly tag or move to appropriate Notebooks Notes that got collected there over the last 7 days. (If you remember, if you don’t specify destination for your Notes, by default they will go to your Default Notebook).
- Alternatively, you can run a search for Notes added within the last 7 days and organize them as per suggestions above. (Use created:week-1 or created:day-7 search operators to do that. I’d recommend taking it one step further and saving this search, so that you can simply select it from the drop down).
- Clean up or add details to Notes, if/when needed. Often times when we capture information or add snippets or ideas on the go we don’t add too much context. Make sure to take the time to add context or clean up your Notes if only during your weekly Evernote reviews.
- Delete any Notes if the idea or information become irrelevant or obsolete.
- Clean up tags or Notebooks. As you review the Notes added throughout the week, make sure that you didn’t add a tag or create a Notebook that doesn't match your structure. Not to worry, you can always make those modifications retrospectively. Tags: tab on a tag to rename it or drag it into the correct category. Notebooks: right-click the Notebook name or click the little gear icon to the right of the Notebook name and edit the name. if necessary, drag it into the appropriate Stack or delete a Stack and regroup the Notebooks in a better way.
Maintaining your Evernote will ensure that you can fully rely on your “external brain.”
Login to downloadLesson notes are only available for subscribers.