So if you think about searching, you’re looking for the most unique word, right? So I’ll typically throw in the word that I think will lead me to that note,” she says. “I’ve developed a bit of a strange ability to retain keywords. I’ve found the act of clipping or saving notes and annotating them with my reactions encourages me to remember ideas. “Good tagging and good keyword use, and the more you use it, I think the more you self-train toward that.” “Evernote has such speedy search, it's been the reason that I’ve probably stuck with the platform across a decade, because I never have any trouble finding anything,” says Stephens. With a little digging, you can find old notes, even if they weren't tagged or filed correctly. “The notes that I found, just in doing a cursory review, were still very relevant, so I shared them with that individual, and he said, ‘Gosh, this is the best roadmap for my job, and I wouldn't have known to ask these questions.’”Įvernote supports optical character recognition and saved searches. We had an individual who was in a leadership role within our company at that time, who is no longer with us, and we have a new individual in that role,” she says.

“I found some notes from May 2019 that were really useful to our business. Stephens completed this type of review a few days before our interview. This review process enables you to see interesting connections between different notes and find ideas you'd forgotten. Set aside thirty minutes each week to review recently captured notes. Evernote will suggest how notes relate to each other, but you really need to dive into your notebook and see what's inside. The real value from any notebook lies in reviewing what's inside and seeing how different ideas relate to each other. “Now, I really err on the side of very few notebooks, rather than trying to have a notebook for everything, then, being giddy with my tags because there's so many ways to cross tag.” It was the equivalent of a file cabinet, and I was just cramming everything into it with no rhyme or reason,” she says. “Five or six years ago, I had to retrain myself because I was getting really sloppy. I usually add five or six tags to individual notes including “creativity” and “productivity,” as well as “work” and “career.” Another is “money.” Stephens follows a similar approach. I can also save these notebooks to a desktop or local computer for offline access. After reviewing them, I file these notes into the Archive notebook. For example, my primary notebooks are Inbox and Archive.

How to use evernote for college