Evernote is a fantastic service to save all sorts of things. Interesting articles, blog posts, to do items. I’m about to hit a milestone of 25,000 notes. How do I work with this large amount of notes? With notebooks!
In Evernote, you put every note into a notebook. I have about 50 notebooks, which is probably too many to be effective. But I use several notebooks the most.
Here are my notebooks with over 1,000 notes.
Screenshots: 11,731 notes
Every single screenshot I take goes into this notebook. Will I ever need these screenshots? Who knows? But the real value in saving these screenshots lies in Evernote’s text recognition feature. Evernote will look at the images you save, and see if there is any text in the image. They will save the text in the image as searchable text. Often times, this does come in handy when I need to search for something that I knew I took a screenshot of.
Archive: 3,929 notes
Read an interesting article online and you’d like to save it? Evernote has a great ability to save the article, and the images into a note. They will cut out all the unneeded stuff on the webpage like the promo columns, headers, and footers. You’ll get just the article!
If the article came from someone I know, I like to tag the article with the person’s name. It’s fun to go back and look at all the articles that someone recommended to you.
Action: 1,703 notes
During my commute when I read articles on my phone, oftentimes there’s an action I want to do with that article. Like post it to my spudart facebook page, or research further details in the article. I’ll email the article to Evernote, and it puts the article into my Action notebook. Admittedly, I haven’t really used this notebook in a couple years.
Blog drafts: 1,286 notes
All my blog drafts sit in this notebook. Yeah, I have way too many drafts. These need to become live, published posts. But at least they are all collected together in one spot. Since I blog on multiple websites, I’ll tag each draft with website name.
I only have a little over 1,000 notes, but I use Evernote much the same as you do. I also use my iPhone to snap photos of handwritten notes that I thenm save as JPEGs in one of several Evernote notebooks. I like how Evernote is able to scan my handwriting and even search for it.