How I organize all non actionable data with

Evernote

By Steven May

freecloud.may@gmail.com

Why Evernote.

There are many great apps for information management however most of them work only on the desktop OS, i.e. Windows or Mac and also lack a fully functional smartphone/tablet app. For example some of the information management apps I've tried: • Evernote • OneNote • Springpad • PersonalBrain All of those are really good choices but nothing is as cross-platform as Evernote. I especially like PersonalBrain and at one point I was using it almost exclusively and using Evernote only as an inbox without actually storing anything in Evernote. I also used PersonalBrain as my main tool for pretty much everything and kept all reference / non actionable data and actions and projects projects there. It worked really well. Here is a very detailed post I made about using PersonalBrain for GTD http://forums.thebrain.com/post?id=2744849&pid=1268943857#post1268943857 However I wanted something I could use on all platforms, especially on iPad and iPhone. So I left PersonalBrain. At least for now. I will take another look at it in the future when they develop an iPad app. Who knows when it'll happen though...

I came back to Evernote.

In fact I never really left Evernote. I was still using Evernote as an inbox even when I used PersonalBrain as my main system. Evernote works on almost any platform. It might not have all the features I want but at least it has all the essential features and works on all devices I use. I can make it do everything I need with some additional tricks/workarounds and the addition of mind mapping (more on that later) Essential features such as • collect stuff • organize it • retrieve it later I want to be able to access my data at all times and I want to be able to collect information on any device I have at hand. Also I choose to use iPad as my main tool for GTD system so it's important that processing and organizing could all be done completely on the tablet without having to rely on other devices like a laptop. Evernote makes this possible because • Easy to collect data

• it works across all platforms • allows me to capture information with almost any device • has web clipping capabilities on almost any device • possible to send email and store it in Evernote • etc.

• Easy to process and organize data • allows me to process and organize information on almost any device

• Easy to review data • allows me to review stored information on almost any device • has very flexible and advanced search capabilities

It doesn't have all of the features I need on the iPad but it's still possible to use it for days without having to rely on the desktop client without problems. There is nothing as good as Evernote at the moment for information management on multiple devices with different operating systems.

Why I don't keep non actionable data and project and action lists in a single app

Actionable data and non actionable data has to be kept clearly separate in GTD. Even if you keep it all in Evernote you would still have to separate it. And also the fact that Evernote is designed for managing reference material and not GTD actions and projects leaves no real good reason to use only Evernote when you can combine it with a separate dedicated GTD app such as Omnifocus. After keeping everything in a single tool and observing how I use my system I realized that I can speed up my workflow by keeping actionable data and non actionable data separate and in different apps and use different apps for their strengths instead of keeping everything in a single app. I realized that keeping actionable and non actionable data connected and in a single place is not important. Since actions and projects should be clearly distinct from all of the non actionable data anyway - It's fairly easy to split action reminders from the rest of the database without creating any problems/complexity. It's a lot more important to be able to access my actionable data with as little effort and drag as possible than to keep it in a single place with the rest of the data. For the 20,000 ft horizons of focus and below I'm using OmniFocus. I use it for actual lists and projects, i.e. for what I have to do. Everything else, i.e. project support and general reference is in Evernote. The only advantage in keeping both actionable and non actionable data in a single app like Evernote would be the ability to very quickly see project specific support for any project because you can link them directly with tags. It is questionable however how quick it'd really be if you take into account all the workarounds and tricks you might have to use. Also with the addition of note links you can link to Evernote from other apps which makes the benefit of keeping it all in Evernote even less apparent. But still just switching between 2 apps is not a problem while keeping everything in a single app like Evernote comes at a high price of giving up a lot of specific GTD dedicated features like start dates, due dates, repeating actions and projects and etc. and also optimized interface for action and project management. In other words it could be done but it's just not worth it.

All task management apps I've tried and used for a reasonable amount of time (days, weeks, months): • RememberTheMilk • Producteev • ToodleDo • NirvanaHq • Nozbe • Things • OmniFocus There were other task management apps I've tried however I didn't use them longer than a couple of hours and I don't even remember all of them.

I use Omnifocus and calendar for managing actionable data instead of keeping it in Evernote.

This way there is a lot less effort and drag whenever I want to check my projects and actions because it is an app dedicated specifically for GTD. Omnifocus is still a pretty complex app but at least its complexity comes from its power and not from the fact that it wasn't designed for managing gtd actions and projects in the first place. I don't have to use any hacks or tricks and workarounds to manage gtd actions and projects in Omnifocus, it just works. I see a lot of people mention how Omnifocus is the most complex task manager out there and that they prefer some simpler task management apps. That's perfectly fine however when I personally started using Omnifocus I had almost no learning curve at all so personally I don't see it as a complex app at all. My guess is that it's complex to people who aren't really getting gtd methodology. Using any simpler tool and not having some functionality would actually make things a lot more complex for me personally. A quote from David Allen: For many newbies, the multiple lists they may see in any of our systems can overwhelm them at first glance. The various classifications we recommend as best practices present a significant increase in complexity over what most pre-GTDers are working with: a calendar and some amorphous kind of "to-do" list, at best. Their responses to our typical sets of lists (calls, office, errands, agendas for boss, agenda for staff meeting, projects, someday maybes, etc.) are "That's so much work to set up and maintain!" and/or "That's so confusing!" The cause of their push-back is twofold. First, few people on the planet, prior to GTD, have had any commitment at all to capturing and objectifying everything they're committed to. So, indeed, if all you wanted to keep track of is what they are currently keeping track of (outside their heads), you probably wouldn't need more than the one to-do list they have. And secondly, because of the incredible amount

of input, distraction, rapid change, and consequent over-commitment gnawing at everyone's gut, there is a huge desire for simplification to relieve the pressure. People often come to GTD for that relief and are negatively surprised to see what looks to them like additional work and complication. "My goodness—look at all those lists!" As someone gets just a little further into the game, however, and is willing to try out some version of our recommended set of lists, they begin to experience the clarity and focus that's been unavailable using his/her previous system. Here's why: There's an interesting phenomenon which was explained to me once as a key cybernetic principle: in order to create simplicity amidst complexity, your system must be equally complex. The corollary to that would be that if you're trying to manage something very complex with too simple a system, it will over-complexify it! And that's just what I've seen over these many years as a coach and educator. People's lives are way more sophisticated, intricate, and multifaceted than the systems they are using to manage them. A calendar and to-do list pale as puny weapons against that kind of universe. In some ways their incompleteness and insufficiency just make the situation worse. Sure I still need to know how to do GTD and the tool won't think for me but I don't have to think about how to use the tool, I just use it. I could do it all in Evernote but it would be just less convenient and would take more time and would add drag and no real benefit, that's all. One could say that keeping it all in a single tool makes the system simpler. But since we need to separate actionable and non actionable data anyway there is very little benefit in keeping it in a single place and a very high price to pay. It's not important to keep completely separate things in a single place. It doesn't make the system any simpler. For example you can store all your music in one place and all your movies in another place and all your passwords in a different place - those are separate things and there is no benefit in combining them in a single place. You wouldn't want to manage them with a single app either. iTunes is an example of an app which gets confusing and clunky because it keeps too many different things in a single place and manages them with a single interface. It works and it could be done but it's not necessary or optimal.

Why I organize all non actionable data in Evernote. The ideal solution is to keep all non actionable data organized in a single place: • it's easier to maintain

• have to organize and maintain data only in a single place instead of multiple places • it's easier to find

• have to search only in a single place Isn't it how google works and what makes it so useful? You can search in one place and get links to anything... Same with Evernote. I don't have to search for stuff in different places. I don't even have to keep everything stored in Evernote exactly either. I just have to index everything in Evernote and have it tell me where the actual location of the stuff is (in case it's not in evernote) and also provide a clickable link whenever possible. This way I can see an overview of everything I have about a specific topic or a project in a single place without having to look in multiple different places and without even thinking about where to look for anything. a quote from Inc. magazine: "Libin has different ways of explaining it: It's your brain offloaded to a server. It's Google for the Web of your life. "

How I organize all non actionable data in Evernote A quote from David Allen "Having good, consistent structures with which to manage the nonactionable items in our work and lives is as important as managing our action and project reminders. When the nonactionable items aren’t properly managed, they clog up the whole process." So true... First of all here is what could be used to organize stuff in Evernote: Notebooks Tags Notes And that's it.

Notebooks And you don't even have to use multiple notebooks at all, everything could be organized in a single notebook and multiple different tags. However using separate notebooks is useful in some cases. For example using an inbox notebook and processed notebook is the absolute minimum I'd use because it's just very convenient to forward all notes to "inbox" notebook at first and move them to "processed" notebook after they are processed. I personally use 6 notebooks at the moment but that's really not the point and 99% of notes go to "processed" notebook. There is nothing you can do with notebooks which couldn't also be done with tags except storing notes locally with local notebooks.

Tags

Basically tags is the main way to organize stuff in Evernote for me. Any note could have multiple tags. When to use separate tags • to organize separate topics/categories

• which you would want to find by a certain keyword • use a certain tag to group and see all information about a certain topic/subject in one

single place Examples: Use separate tags to organize separate projects or organize general reference similar to a simple A-Z filing system. Also use separate tags to group any notes by any criteria.

When this is not enough...

That's all pretty simple and nice however things get a lot more interesting when you need a little or a lot more structure than just flat lists. For example how are you going to organize all material from a book you've read? You could keep it in a flat list tagged as "quotes" but it wouldn't really organize it sufficiently in some cases. How are you going to organize support material for a complex project with lots of sub-projects? Again having all notes in a flat list is better than nothing but it still might not be enough. There are 2 main things I use whenever I need to have more structure: Sub-tags and mind maps.

Sub-tags The problem with sub-tags in Evernote is that they technically don't really exist there. It's only possible to nest some tags under some other tags on the desktop or web version of Evernote. But Evernote doesn't have true sub-tags. Here is an example to explain what I mean • Book

• Fiction • NonFiction • Romance

If Evernote treated sub-tags as true sub-tags then whenever you applied Fiction tag for example all parent tags like "Book" would get applied automatically. The way Evernote works currently sub-tags aren't really useful. The only use is to collapse some tags to save time when scrolling through tag list. There are multiple ways to use tags and "sub-tags" in Evernote and as long as you're not really clear about how you're going to use them - it might clog up the whole process... This was the problem I had in the past because I used Evernote on multiple platforms, windows, mac, iOS and wasn't really clear about what approach exactly I'm using in terms of dealing with tags. It wasn't a terrible problem because things were still stored in Evernote and I could retrieve them but it didn't go as smooth as it could. There was still some amount of drag. It wasn't on auto-pilot and completely effortless. Problems I had and what didn't work: • I wasn't clear if I was using sub-tags or just multiple different tags. • I used mixed approaches to manage tags and sub-tags • Didn't realize how I could use search to navigate tags if their hierarchies were reflected in

their names (more on that later)

Here are all of the ways I could think of to manage tags and sub-tags or in other words categories and sub-categories.

Approaches: • Use multiple tags to replicate sub-tags/nested tags • Encode hierarchies into tag names to replicate sub-tags/nested tags • Encode hierarchies into note titles • To not use sub-tags at all

• you just don't organize anything into sub-tags/subfolders/subcategories • To use sub-tags without much thought

• and letting things fall through the cracks Lets look at the first three approaches in detail to see which approach would be the most easy to maintain.

Encode hierarchies into note titles

Here is Owyn post at Evernote forum which describes this approach I use structured Titles to handle this case. e.g. I have a lot of notes related to Evernote. Most of these notes are in a single notebook. All of these notes have the tag "App_Evernote". The only additional tags I regularly use for these notes are "bug" and "tip". The titles have the approximate form: Evernote - <Client>|<Source>[/<Function>] - <Description> Some recent examples include: Evernote - Skitch/iOS - Skitch for iPad is Here! « Evernote Blogcast Evernote - Windows/Sync - Test changed password at service (Sync Failed) Evernote - Blog - How to Easily Track eStatements with Evernote and Gmail | Cloud Productivity Evernote - Web/Clipper - Clearly Arrives on Firefox « Evernote Blogcast The <Description> portion is normally the default title for the clip. And more about this example from Owyn: The example you quote is specific to that use case. It is optimized to make sense when I update notes for that use case and to make search results more readable. It is also stable for the foreseen future. The specific notes involved are currently 1265 out of 7568 in my database. A significant percentage, but, far from all. I actually use almost all of the techniques you describe as needs arise.

e.g. I have a lot of software application reference notes. The tag "App_Evernote" is an instance of a set of prefixed tags which identify specific applications. http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/23074-tags-for-multiple-notebooks/page__view__findpost__p__118619 Notes can easily be coded/tagged for use with many use cases. My note titles however are frequently structured to support a primary use case (if applicable). An example: • Book

• Fiction • NonFiction • Romance

Would look like • Book And that'd be it. You'll organize notes into sub-categories by adding those sub-categories to note titles. This could be a reasonable approach in some cases however I don't use it to organize notes into sub-folders/sub-categories or replicate sub-tags. Problems with this approach: • Note titles are not a convenient way to keep track of folders and subfolders • Hierarchies in note titles wouldn't work under multiple tags However I do use note titles to organize some notes, i.e. I add a type of a note to its title. Type of a note is something which describes what note represents and any note could have only one type. For example some notes are my own thoughts and I add "Thoughts - " to its title; some notes are used for mind maps and I add "mm"; some notes are describing how to do something and I add "Tips - " and etc. This makes it possible to sort notes nicely by name even when they are still kept in a single flat list and of course this could also be used in search.

Use multiple tags to replicate sub-tags/nested tags Here is BurgersNFries post about this approach http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/22415-how-i-use-tags-to-replicate-nested-folders/ This is one thing many people new to Evernote have a problem with - the lack of sub folders. IMO (and apparently Evernote's), tags can replicate nested folders but are much more flexible. Tags replicate nested folders this way. I have two insurance policies. One is for car A & one is for Car B. On my hard drive, they may be stored like this: ... Both of these situations can be replicated in Evernote by using these tags: insurance policies car A car B Car A insurance policy is tagged "insurance policies" and "car A". Searching on those two tags will give the same exact results as if I had the documents stored in sub folders on a hard drive. I don't even need to apply a "car" tag The reason tags are much more flexible than sub folders is because let's say the policy is for both cars. To use sub folders, I'd need to have two copies of the document - one in the Car A sub folder & one in the Car B sub folder. But with tags, I simply have the one document & use all three tags, "insurance policies", "car A" and "car B'. When I want to find the insurance policy for Car A, I still just search on ""insurance policies" and "car A". Actually this is not a good example of how to replicate sub-tags with multiple tags because both car A and car B and insurance policies are just multiple different tags. There are no real sub-tags in this example. There is also no need for sub-tags in this example either because all of those tags don't have any hierarchical parent-child relationship. This example shows how to find notes at intersection of multiple tags. It might get really confusing if you're not even clear about whether you're actually using sub-tags or not in the first place. Not to mention that you have to be clear about what approach you're using. In this actual example there were no real sub-tags so it's a bit misleading in my view. I apply multiple different tags to notes all the time but I don't replicate sub-tags by applying a sub-tag and also all parent tags. I use a slightly different approach for sub-tags which would be described later.

But still even this approach would also work. It's just not optimal.

An example: • Book

• Fiction • NonFiction • Romance

Whenever you apply a sub-tag "Fiction" you have to also apply all parent tags, e.g. "Book" tag. You would do this in order to be able to look at the tag "Books" and see all notes which are also tagged as "Fiction", "NonFiction" and etc. and to be able to search in all books. Sure you could just not apply the parent tag "Book" but at this point you're not really using sub-tags at all then, you won't be able to see all books in one place or search in all books at all. Well actually you could - by selecting all sub-tags manually and using "any" search operator. Still it's too much work to be used regularly. Problems with this approach: • you have to apply all parent tags manually and remember them

• inconvenient and hard to maintain • there are no nested tags on mobile clients so your tags and sub-tags would be all over the

place in the tag list Using multiple tags is great for keeping notes related to multiple different topics/categories in multiple places but not so great when you want to actually replicate sub-tags even though it's possible.

Encode hierarchies into tag names to replicate sub-tags/nested tags

This is the best approach in my view. An example: • Book

• Fiction • NonFiction • Romance

Would look like • Book-Fiction • Book-NonFiction • Book-Romance Search ties it all together. By applying only a single tag with a hierarchy encoded in its name you automatically applied all parent tags. The key is you navigate those artificial parent "tags" by searching. E.g. to look at all books you use search for tag:book* instead of using any actual tag. You could apply all parent tags manually as in previous approach but it's just more work compared to using naming conventions. The results would be exactly the same, you're just going to use different ways to find stuff. With this approach you are using search to look at parent tags. Applying all parent tags manually gives no benefit and just takes a lot more work. So you have to use naming conventions. I actually don't see it as a problem at all except sometimes tag names would get too long to be readable on the iPad. As long as you use naming conventions all tags and sub-tags are sorted nicely in the tag list so it works well on mobile devices and tablets. Problems with this approach: • Limited amount of sub-tags you can use until their names would get too long to be

conveniently readable and manageable. So you can't really conveniently go many levels deep with nesting sub-tags this way.

At least there are no show stopping problems. Renaming could be a problem but it's unlikely you'll be renaming parent tags often if at all.

Jbenson2 explains this approach really well in his posts at Evernote forum and here is one of his posts:

The advantage with the tag system I use is that it is: * well structured for easy expansion * logical and consistent * easy to remember tag names * even if I forget the tag, just type the first letter and all the possible choices appear * close to a hierarchy setup (true hierarchy does not exist with Evernote) Notes for close family members • Family

o Fam-JLB o Fam-DLB o Fam-BEB

Notes for companies I do business with • Company

o Com-Blackberry o Com-Charter o Com-Culligan

Notes for insurance matters • Insurance

o Ins-Home o Ins-Medical o Ins-Dental o Ins-Car

Notes for current and previous employment • Jobs

o Job-Abc o Job-Def o Job-Ghi

Notes for government organizations (April 15) • Government

o Govt-County o Govt-Fed o Govt-State o Govt-Town

Mind maps

Mind maps are essential for me to really focus on some topics and organize them in great detail. They are useful when I want to see the big picture and connections between things. There is a lot of info about mind mapping so if you have no idea about what mind mapping is then you could just look for more info on the web. I personally learned the most about mind mapping from David Allen webinar at GTD connect. There is no perfect tool that does both things really well - mind mapping and all information management. Information management apps like Evernote are not as flexible for focusing on a single topic as mind mapping apps or outliners and etc. And mind mapping apps are not great for managing all information. In theory you could use a mind mapping app to manage all information but in practice a software for both great mind map editing and great all information management doesn't exist (yet). Even PersonalBrain isn't there (yet). You would still want to use separate mind maps to really focus on a single topic because you don't want to connect all related thoughts all the time anyway. All information is interrelated in some ways. That's why it is not very useful to have everything in an endless mind map. When you do actually connect everything then those connections lose meaning. It takes a lot of effort to connect everything and gives no real benefit. There is a key difference between organizing a certain topic, focusing on it in detail and all information. Mind maps are just separate notes because whenever you focus on a single topic you want to keep everything in one place anyway.

When to use sub-tags and when to use mind maps

Mind maps are really good for organizing complex topics in great detail. They are easy to read because the information is presented much more visually compared to a flat text. The problem is that mind maps are not as fast to use compared to simple flat lists of notes with maybe some additional sub-lists. Whenever I process my inbox in Evernote it's a lot faster to organize a note with just some tags compared to switching to a mind map and organizing it there. It's really up to you to decide whether you would want to use mind maps or just tags and sub-tags for certain topics however here are some of my thoughts When to use tags or sub-tags • To process notes fast • It's not important to see notes in context. Not important to see the big picture. When to use mind maps • More structure and organization is needed • To focus on some certain topic in great detail • It's important to see the big picture and connections between things • It's important to see things in context

How I integrate mind mapping with Evernote on iPad

My mind maps are always accessible online and offline and are in sync across all my devices, i.e. iPhone, iPad, macbook, windows desktop. I use mind maps on iPad 99% of the time though. The best you can do to integrate Evernote with any other (mind mapping) app on iOS is to use notes with clickable links to location of files in other apps instead of keeping actual files. The best you can do to make this integration completely cross platform is to have this other (mind mapping) app have some sort of cloud syncing like dropbox integration. So you could open those files on any platform. This is what I do. I make mind maps on iPad in iThoughtsHD app and export them as Pdf files to Evernote notes for indexing purposes and add links to their location so I could open them from Evernote. I don't store the actual mind map files in Evernote because apps cannot share files within the iOS.

This way to edit some mind map on the iPad all I have to do is to find it in Evernote and tap on a link to open it in iThoughtsHD mind mapping app. To edit any mind map on a desktop I go to to dropbox folder and open the mind map from there. But I still search for this mind map in Evernote to find out its exact name to copy and paste it in the search bar in windows explorer in Dropbox folder. It's important to understand that even though I don't store the actual mind map files in Evernote itself, I still organize them and search for them only in Evernote. I do keep them elsewhere, i.e. on iPad in iThoughtsHD app and in Dropbox but the organization is minimal, i.e. just a single flat folder for everything.

A note about how I manage all my data

I don't rely on Evernote to store all my files but I do store data in the cloud and in a single place. Almost. Technically it's in 2 places - iCloud and Crashplan servers.

Evernote database is just a part of all my data. Even though it's a very important part of it...

I still have a master copy of all of my data in the cloud, I just don't try to use Evernote as an all in one solution for everything. Firstly it's impossible to store all files in Evernote anyway, secondly even though it might sound good in theory but in practice it'd just overcomplexify the system. To give you an idea of how I manage all my data here is a mind map

It's a good idea to additionally backup cloud services. I also even keep a setup file for Evernote and other essential software backed up. I backup non stop 24/7 Non automated backup = fail for me personally because i'll just procrastinate about it indefinitely. I back up everything additionally with crashplan. If all my devices are destroyed or stolen and my home burns down AND Evernote and dropbox and all cloud based services also go down - I would still NOT lose anything! Also restoring the system completely from scratch would take very little effort and time. So basically the thing I wanted to point out with this is - not storing the actual files of mind maps in Evernote doesn't really matter if you look at the big picture because Evernote doesn't cover everything in terms of file and data management anyway.

Organizing Evernote notes in mind maps Some notes which are organized in a mind map are also kept in Evernote. This way if I want to see those notes in a context I look in a mind map and if I want to find and just read the notes - I just search in Evernote. The problem is - if I want to keep things organized in both places - how do I know if some note in Evernote is already organized in some mind map or not? For example what if I just add some notes to Evernote but they are also related to a topic which is organized in some mind map, how do I keep track of this and keep everything updated whenever necessary? The solution is tags. Notes which are also organized in a certain mind map are also additionally tagged with the name of this mind map. This way it's clear which notes are already organized in some mind map and which are not. And I can use search to filter out notes which are already in a certain mind map or all mind maps. Or I can use search to search for notes which are in some certain mind map or in any mind map. It's very flexible. How to • Whenever you organize some Evernote note in a mind map

• Additionally tag the note with a name of this mind map • so that you know which notes are or are not organized in this mind map

Examples

At first I'm just going to demonstrate my workflow with the simplest example in which you don't even need to use any sub-tags or mind maps.

Using only (multiple) tags for organization This would be a very simple project in which I just need to register some flight cards. Everything starts with the process of capture. Capturing information is one of Evernote biggest strengths. So I just take pictures of some flight cards which I need to register and send them to Evernote inbox. I also add a note with a due date for this project.

Then eventually this inbox gets processed... So I process each note one at a time. Besides - there is no other way to do it on the iPad anyway. Sometimes some limitations are actually beneficial. Anyway in this case it's the picture of a card I took previously. It's useful because it has the website address to go to in order to register the card.

I assign a tag with the project name and move the note from the inbox to the reference notebook. I also create a project in Omnifocus with exactly the same name. Using exactly the same name is very convenient because I can copy this name from Omnifocus and paste it in Evernote to quickly find all support material notes for the project without browsing manually.

Note links to a specific Evernote note could also be used in theory but I don't use them in this case. First of all I don't need to reference just a specific note and secondly it's not possible to copy note links on iPad. Due date is also added to the project in Omnifocus and the note with the due date is deleted from Evernote during processing. I also search Evernote for passport info because I know I'm going to need it for this project. And then I tag the passport info note with this particular project tag so that I have all the information for the project in a single place. This is also an example of using multiple tags to store the same note in multiple places, i.e. now I store passport details in 2 places - tagged as "/prj- activated flight cards" and also "passport". Even though a note has multiple tags there are no sub-tags/nested tags/sub-folders in this example."passport" tag is not a sub-tag of "/prj- activated flight cards" tag or vice versa. Those are just multiple unrelated tags and there is a note

at their intersection. Here is how the "/prj- activated flight cards" tag looks (I hide some stuff)

This is a very simple example but this would probably be sufficient for 80% of all cases.

Using mind maps for organization

In this example I'm going to show a completely different kind of project. It'd be a lot more creative this time... The project would be "got non actionable data on cruise control". The project itself is fairly simple - it's basically me figuring out the best way to manage non actionable data on the iPad. There are no sub-projects, dependencies, due dates, calendar items and etc. But if they were there - it'd still be organized similarly. This project needs more organization and structure than just a flat list of notes. The information I was capturing for this project was partially from the web but I was also capturing a lot of stuff which was coming from me internally, i.e. my own thoughts, questions, open loops. Such information would not work in just a flat list because the information itself isn't as important as its context and relationships/connections. I need to organize it in a way that would make sense to me and then look at it externally and see the big picture or focus on some details whenever necessary. In other words capturing and then retrieving some notes as was demonstrated in the previous example isn't enough in this case. I need to also work with information, brainstorm and then organize things by moving them around, group related thoughts, connect everything and see things in context and etc.

This is how the main mind map for this project looks overall.

And then some parts in more detail:

The sky is the limit in terms of organization here... You could organize your thoughts this way without much effort. There is no way I could organize and manage all my thoughts this way in Evernote with just tags and then see the big picture and get something meaningful out of it all. This mind map could of course be replaced with one single huge text note and note links to some notes but it'd be too painful to manage and to read so it'd be pretty useless because I'd just avoid actually using it and nothing would get done. However I still need Evernote to manage those mind maps and I still need Evernote to capture all my thoughts before organizing them and not everything has to be organized in a mind map. Sometimes I even have some resistance to brainstorming in an already created mind map. I really just need a clear blank page to quickly write down my thoughts without any organization whatsoever. I could use Evernote for this and just capture all thoughts as separate notes and then organize them later. But I actually use an additional app for capturing such notes and then saving them to Evernote. It's FastEver XL. It has more screen space for note editing and it's faster for creating simple notes compared to Evernote. It takes only one single tap to start taking a note and another single tap to send it to Evernote. Again, as I've stated previously - I don't keep some projects in Evernote and some in mind maps. This would lead to problems such as:

• Don't know where to start creating notes

• Resistance and drag

• Can't see everything at once

• Have to look in multiple places to make sure nothing is missed

• Have to maintain data in multiple places I keep all non actionable data in a single place - Evernote. mm in the beginning of a note name means it's a mind map. It helps to sort notes nicely by name. Also notes which contain mind maps are tagged with a "mind map file" tag. It's unnecessary but I like to use a tag as well so I can find all mind maps by this tag. Here are some examples of what I'm doing:

It's possible to use mind maps as a front end for Evernote notes and get the best out of both worlds whenever necessary. Also here are some keyboard shortcuts I use on iPad to speed up searching in Evernote

It could be set up in iPad general settings.

Using sub-tags for organization

The best way to use sub-tags for organization is to use the approach which I described previously, i. e. Encode hierarchies into tag names to replicate sub-tags/nested tags. You would want to use sub-tags mostly in cases when mind maps are unnecessary and inconvenient but a single tag is not enough and you need a little more hierarchy. Of course you would also want to combine both mind maps and sub-tags in some cases. Think about mind maps as very detailed notes which focus on a single topic and tags and sub-tags as categories/folders for separate topics.

The key here is being clear and consistent about how you are going to use them, i.e. how you are going to organize and navigate them to avoid any drag.

An example: • Book

• Fiction • NonFiction • Romance

Would look like • Book-Fiction • Book-NonFiction • Book-Romance Search ties it all together. By applying only a single tag with a hierarchy encoded in its name you automatically applied all parent tags. The key is you navigate those artificial parent "tags" by searching. E.g. to look at all books you use search for tag:book* instead of using any actual tag. You could apply all parent tags manually as in previous approach but it's just more work compared to using naming conventions. The results would be exactly the same, you're just going to use different ways to find stuff. With this approach you are using search to look at parent tags. Applying all parent tags manually gives no benefit and just takes a lot more work. So you have to use naming conventions. I actually don't see it as a problem at all except sometimes tag names would get too long to be readable on the iPad. As long as you use naming conventions all tags and sub-tags are sorted nicely in the tag list so it works well on mobile devices and tablets. Also here is an example of how this would look on iPad:

Hope this helps!