My Evernote Structure

I've gotten a lot of questions as to how I set up my notebooks and tags in Evernote for my school work. There are a lot of different ways to go about it, depending on what works best for you. I recently changed up my own structure to better reflect my current needs. I'll go through both setups to give multiple ideas.

I've come to use Evernote for a lot more than just my school work. I'm also using it to organize my job search, my recipes, my workouts, and more. So for different functions, I'll tag differently. This post is only about how I tag for school work.

So as students, we have a lot of different things going on: classes, clubs, internships, etc. For most of my college career, I used a separate notebook for each class and club. All of these notebooks were collected into a notebook stack titled "College." I also had a "High School" stack. This system worked very well for me, making it easy to separate my notes into exactly what I needed to view at that moment.

As I'm heading into my final semester of school, the amount of notebooks I had was getting a little out of hand for my liking. I wanted to streamline things, especially since I knew that I would soon be transitioning from college life to the working world, meaning I wouldn't be accessing my school notes nearly as often. Hence my restructuring.

What I decided to do was rather simple. Instead of having separate notebooks for everything, each class, club, and internship got its own tag. By using the select all function in each notebook, I easily added this tag to every note at once. All of the notes were then moved into one "College" notebook. I did the same thing with my "High School" Stack. Now, instead of having two separate stacks, with well over 50 notebooks, I have one "School" stack with two notebooks.

Besides the tags for each class, I also add tags for the type of note. For example, when I'm taking notes in class, I'll tag the note with the name of the class, as well as "Class Notes." I have several other tags like this, such as "handout," "research," or "assignment."

So, by using this structure, if I had an exam in my literature class, I can view all the notes from that class tag. From there, I can search for a specific topic, or I can limit my view to just notes from that class with the tag "class notes" if that's what I'm using to study.

Now I've also gotten some questions as to whether or not I tag based on the topic of my notes. I personally don't. Evernote has some pretty intense search capabilities so I have always been able to find what I needed with that. If I were doing a much larger project, such as a dissertation, I might choose to tag in this way then, however, for now, I've found my current tagging structure to be more than enough.

Looking for some more ideas on tagging structures? Check out Allan Johnson's post here. He's a fellow Evernote Ambassador!

How do you set up your tags for school? Comment below or let me know @OtterMC on Twitter!