One Girl Revolution

While I love Evernote, its lack of sub-notebooks was the bane of my existence until recently, when I decided to get smart about my tagging system.

My Notebooks

Awwww!

I have four notebooks: Personal, Work, Study and one called Snippets, which is where I store random web clips such as cute bunny pictures.

(Sadly, I have no credit information for this pic, but I want to know!)

My first step was to look at my existing tags and figure out which sub-notebooks I would have used for each main notebook.

A lot of scribbling later, and I had a rough draft.

For my Personal notebook I created main tags called: HOUSEHOLD (for recipes, plumbers’ business card, etc), LISTS and OUT-N-ABOUT (for details of restaurants, etc).

WORK was its own main tag, plus sub-tags for guiding-scouting, webdesign and writing.

My STUDY main tag held tags for courses, research and spiritual.

Evernote "Folders" in action

Note the use of capital letters for the main tags. This makes it much easier to spot main tags in the list, and therefore it is easier to collapse them when looking at other notebooks (e.g, I collapse the STUDY and WORK tag-folders when I am working exclusively with PERSONAL stuff).

I was also missing a way to “star” important notes – again solved using a main tag ^STARRED (the ^ keeps it at the top of the list). Now, anything I want to keep an eye on gets dragged to this tag.

As you can see from the screenshot, when the Personal notebook is selected, the STUDY and WORK main tags are greyed out. Only the main tags associated with the Personal notebook are in black.

This system is constantly refining itself, but hopefully it will provide a jumping-off point for anyone looking to replicate some sort of sub-notebook functionality into Evernote!