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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.

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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.”  

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  • 00:04 Evernote has the potential to become your quote unquote external brain,
  • 00:08 which makes it extremely important for
  • 00:11 you to keep your information in Evernote as orderly as possible.
  • 00:16 Because as great as Evernote is, if you can't easily find the information
  • 00:21 that you have saved there, you will stop trusting it.
  • 00:24 So to ensure that Evernote remains that trustworthy tool,
  • 00:28 two things need to happen.
  • 00:31 One, you must create a structure.
  • 00:33 And you create a structure so
  • 00:36 that whenever you add information into Evernote you know where it needs to go.
  • 00:42 And two, you must maintain that structure because you will add notes on the fly.
  • 00:49 You will forget or you will not have time to add proper tags or
  • 00:54 put your notes into proper notebooks.
  • 00:56 It's okay.
  • 00:57 But, you have to make sure that eventually,
  • 01:01 your notes do get properly tagged and do end up in the right notebooks.
  • 01:07 So, let's take a look at how you can ensure that.
  • 01:11 To ensure that all you need to do is set aside 30 minutes a week
  • 01:16 and do an Evernote maintenance session.
  • 01:20 And what will happen during those 30 minutes is as follows.
  • 01:25 One, you will check everything,
  • 01:27 every single note that has been added over the course of last seven days.
  • 01:33 And for that you can check your default notebook.
  • 01:36 Because if you remember whenever you do not specify in which notebook
  • 01:41 a note should be added, it will be added to your default notebook.
  • 01:46 Another way of checking what notes have been
  • 01:49 added over the course of last seven days is to run a search.
  • 01:53 And right here, I have a search operator for you that you can use.
  • 01:58 Created, column, date, hyphen 7.
  • 02:02 Or, you can use a similar one, created, column, week, hyphen 1.
  • 02:08 Both of them will give you the same results.
  • 02:10 Evernote will pull up for you all the notes
  • 02:13 that have been added to your Evernote over the last seven days.
  • 02:18 So take at look at those notes.
  • 02:21 Check if those notes have been assigned proper tags.
  • 02:27 If you rely on notebooks to organize your Evernote,
  • 02:30 make sure that you put those notes in the proper notebooks.
  • 02:35 Also take a look and see if you need to add or
  • 02:39 clarify anything that you have added to Evernote.
  • 02:42 Maybe you have added something on the fly and now you need to add some details,
  • 02:46 some context.
  • 02:47 So that whenever you come back to this note you know what you actually meant.
  • 02:55 Or maybe you will delete some notes, because maybe you had an idea that is
  • 03:01 now obsolete, and you don't actually need it.
  • 03:04 Lastly take the time to clean up your tags and notebooks.
  • 03:10 If for some reason you've added a tag, or
  • 03:12 created a notebook that doesn't match Your structure.
  • 03:17 You can do that during your Evernote neatness session as well.
  • 03:21 And if you remember, renaming your tags or notebooks is as easy
  • 03:26 as right-clicking the name of that tag or notebook and renaming them.
  • 03:32 Or you can always drag them up or
  • 03:35 down to make sure that they are in the right place of your structure.
  • 03:40 So all these different strategies will help you to maintain your Evernote
  • 03:46 which in will ensure that you can fully rely on your quote unquote external brain.

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