My Evernote Workflow – Do More With Less

I’ve been using Evernote for a while to keep track of ideas and notes, but it got a bit unwieldy. I had different notebooks within the app, different tags, and shit that has been growing weeds for a few years.

I looked into things like Notational Velocity but I liked Evernote’s image and iphone stuff a bit more than the very cool and minimal route. (I take a lot of pictures of whiteboards, Evernote helps me search through the text therein… sometimes).

PS. there’s a video at the end of this post… so, there’s that, you know, if you like that sort of thing.

So I came up with a bit of a quick fix and i’ve been using it for the past 4 months. I love it. You’d like to hear it? It goes like this:

Keyword Titles

I use keyword tags within my note titles. So, for example, “Qbechase”is the tag I start every title with for icetothebrim.com ideas… So when I get a new idea for a icetothebrim.com blog post, i’ll create a new note with the title: Qbechase tell everyone how awesome they are.

Why use the capital “Q”to start the tag? Because you want to pick a naming convention that will allow you to search for your term without getting irrelevant notes. And also because the “Q”is right there waiting for you on your iPhone keyboard… So you can just start typing right away.

Here’s a few of the tags I’m using for my projects:

• Qfa
• Qca
• Qbechase
• Qstory
• Qsong

Create your own tags and you’re going to like the way you look; I guarantee it.

Saved Searches

Once you create your own tags you can use saved searches to quickly locate all the notes about your different projects.

This is where the unique keyword tags at the beginning of your note titles come into play. Simply search for your keyword tag (e.g., “Qbechase”) and click the Save button underneath the search field. Evernote will save your search on the left.

Now you can create new notes and they are automatically findable in your project saved searches because you simply started the note off with your unique keyword tag.

Write In Markdown

I mentioned this before in the post about blogging on a mac: I write all my notes and blog posts using the Markdown syntax. This is great because:

1. Markdown is easy to learn and write in.
2. Markdown is easy to read.
3. Markdown can be converted quickly to HTML.

Don’t read? Here’s a video