Evernote expert Stacey Harmon tours us through 10 Hacks and Tips to get us utilising Evernote in the best manner ready for 2020.
Fixing Evernote and Spotlight indexing For the longest time I have been wanting to use Evernote to store my notes. But one major issue has been preventing me from doing that every time I tried to switch from a bundle of markdown files to Evernote: the fact that Spotlight search in Evernote notes didn't work. Evernote expert Stacey Harmon tours us through 10 Hacks and Tips to get us utilising Evernote in the best manner ready for 2020. You can either watch the video below or read our blog post recap, full of useful links to improve your Evernote experience. The new Evernote for iOS is a major milestone in our journey to rebuild our apps, our infrastructure, and how we ship software. But it's only the beginning. Evernote News Introducing the New Evernote for iOS. We’ve rebuilt our app for iPhone and iPad from the ground up to be more intuitive, more stable, and ever more useful.
You can either watch the video below or read our blog post recap, full of useful links to improve your Evernote experience.
📺 Top 10 Hacks and Tips
Use the full-featured Evernote desktop app to organize your data and use mobile apps to quickly capture new things. You can download them here.
Create an inbox notebook and set it as your default notebook.
Use your default notebook as a processing station for the information you collect, don’t let them accumulate there.
Organize your notes using notebooks, instead of tags. Notebooks can be shared, while tags can’t and don’t work the same way across devices. Related: Why Michael Hyatt is Wrong about Organizing Evernote with Tags
Use naming conventions for your note titles and prep them for search success. Related: Evernote in the Wild: Search & Work Remote
Use the Evernote advanced search parameters. For example, typing intitle: before a keyword will restrict your search to the title of your notes. Related: 5 Evernote Shortcuts I Use Every Day
Get familiar with note links to create structure and navigate between different parts of your system.
Use the Web Clipper to capture web pages and bookmarks. You can download it here.
Create notes even from outside Evernote using:
The unique email address associated with your Premium Evernote account.
The Scannable app for iOS
The built-in Evernote’s camera available on all mobile apps.
Learn keyboard shortcuts to improve your Evernote desktop experience. Related: 5 Evernote Shortcuts I Use Every Day
Bonus tip: use the table of contents feature to build a roster of notes and use the non-dated reminder feature to pin it at the top of your notebook. Related: Mastering Evernote: Your Complete Guide to Note Link Nirvana
Additional Resources
Stacey’s website harmonenterprises.com
Stacey’s Free Guide: The Top 6 Tips to Getting the Most Out of Evernote
Tools They Use #56: Total Evernote Use & Lessons from the GTD method with Stacey Harmon
The power of a reference file system often goes unappreciated. As any knowledge worker worth his salt will tell you, you can’t hold every bit of information you receive in your head. No matter how spacious your mind is, you will eventually forget something important or let a good idea slip away. This is where having a more rigorous file program can ease the load.
Evernote is a general reference filing system app. Many people use it for taking notes, but it can do much more for you than a simple digital notepad.
Evernote Puts Filing Quick At Hand
Filing is important for keeping your business and personal life organized. You will always need to keep track of some sort of paper trail, whether it be for financial reasons or matters of convenience.
In order to work properly, a filing system must be quick and ready at any moment you have something to file. If filing is not quick and easy, an important file or idea will slip out of your grasp and escape your system. Or, even worse, you’ll have clusters of files in piles around your office, and your general work area will quickly become a mess.
Evernote helps you avoid this kind of vulnerability by providing web-based, desktop, or mobile options. The “Web Clipper” browser extension lets you grab information from the websites you visit. The desktop app is available for Windows and Mac operating systems, and it syncs easily with the cloud. For capturing a file on the go, the mobile app is widely supported on the most popular mobile operating systems. This way, whether you’re on the go or working at your computer, you can quickly snap a file quickly and easily.
Powerful Index of Files
Leveraging the full power of Evernote gives you a bulletproof index of all the files you need to keep handy. And with a premium account, you have unlimited cloud space for storing all of your data.
Space is of critical importance when it comes to choosing a file system. It’s good to purge unneeded files once in a while, but you also need to be able to keep as much data as is necessary to avoid the risks of losing critical information.
Aggressive Tagging
In order to have a properly functioning file system, it is necessary to create some sort of context identifiers. In Evernote, aggressive “tagging” lets you properly index a file and search for it later.
Likewise, you can nest tags within other tags to make sure every identifier is properly sorted.
Strengths and Weaknesses of an Evernote Filing System
Depending on your needs, your use of Evernote may differ, but the program is sufficiently customizable within a few rigid parameters.
Evernote Spotlight
Software Rigidity
Too many organizational programs on the market suffer by offering too much flexibility. Often, you’ll find a new piece of software that basically puts a stylish user interface on top of a standard relational database. It looks flashy, but you’ll likely spend hours developing a custom schema for this database while simultaneously learning the feature set for interacting with the data.
Conversely, Evernote is more rigid and structured. This might seem limiting, but for the purpose of keeping an organized file structure, it shines.
Purging and Reminding
It’s important to purge files at regular intervals. At least once in a year, you should go through all the year’s files and delete anything no longer needed to keep your system functioning.
What Is Evernote Spotlight
To make the purging easier, you can use the “All Notes” view to see every note and file in your collection, so you can easily scan through and delete as you go.
Likewise, you could use the tagging feature to sort through old notes sequentially. Select a group of tags and start searching through for anything that can be purged.
If you want to re-evaluate a note later so you don’t have to think about it right now, you can easily set a reminder to come back to that note later. Evernote will send you a notification to review the file so you can decide to act on it or delete it.
Evernote Spotlight Quit Unexpectedly Mac
Alpha Filing
By default, Evernote sorts your notebooks alphabetically. And while you can “stack” notebooks in a single collection, you cannot nest notebooks like folders or directories.
Evernote Spotlight エラー
Again, this may seem limiting, but in terms of having a functional filing system, this level of depth works out just fine given the tagging system. Many power Evernote users rely most upon the tagging feature to search with finer detail.
Evernote Spotlight Quit Unexpectedly Mac
Don’t Let Slippage Happen To You
Evernote Spotlight Search
If you let files and ideas and inspirations slip away, you’re in need of a better filing system. You never know exactly when you’ll have a good idea, or when you’ll need a specific piece of information. By having a properly organized filing system you can offload this problem into a trusted program.