Year-End Clean Up of Evernote

As we near the end of the year, it’s a good time to clean up your Evernote files and getting your system ready for the new year.  Here are some tips.

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Key Points:

Notebook Review Process:

• Evaluate the relevance of existing notebooks: Are they serving their purpose?
• Consider adding new notebooks for new projects or areas of life.
• Move outdated notebooks to an archive rather than deleting them, creating a notebook stack for archiving.

Tag Review Process:

• Review and potentially update tags associated with people and work locations.
• Assess the validity and usefulness of tags linked to the workflow and the Getting Things Done system.

Adapting to Changes:

• Reflect on changes in work and life circumstances that may impact the relevance of tags and notebooks.
• Example: Reconsidering the importance of an “office only” tag after transitioning to a home-based consulting business and teaching at a university.

Archiving for Reference:

• Create archive folders or stacks to store notebooks and tags that are no longer actively used but may still hold valuable information for reference.

Email System Check:

• Extend the review beyond Evernote to include the email system, checking for items that also deserve archiving.

Reflection on System Usage:

• Consider the overall effectiveness of the existing productivity system.
• Reevaluate the validity of concepts and tags, making adjustments as needed to align with current work practices.

Searchability and Accessibility: Archiving notes and notebooks doesn’t mean losing track of information; items remain accessible through search functionality.

Transcript:

I’ve traditionally used my downtime around the holidays to go through my productivity system, filing away things that I’m no longer using, and I make sure my systems are functioning properly and most efficiently. That means I do a full scale review and cleanup of Evernote. Hi, I’m Dave Edwards, I hope that your New Year’s resolution includes upgrading your productivity game, perhaps my course getting things done with Evernote can help you out. Find out more at Dave Edwards media.com and just click on courses. So let’s go inside my Evernote account. So I can show you how I do my year end cleanup and review. I’ve always found that at the end of the year, when things slow down a little bit, setting aside personal obligations, that it’s a good time to review your systems. During the year, we just seem to be so busy that all we can do is input data and do our work. But the end of the year is a really great time to go over everything in our system. So one of the things that I always tried to do to start with is to go through all of my notebooks, do they serve me well? Are they the right kind of notebooks? Do I need to add new notebooks for new projects or new areas of my life that are important to me? Do some of my notebooks no longer apply to what I do.

In which case, I don’t want to delete them, I want to move them to an archive, I suggest creating a notebook stack for your archive. Now you can have multiple stacks, you could have a stack for work, you could have a stack for home, you can have a stack for any number of areas or contexts that you use throughout the year. Some people I know have archives that are associated with the year like archive dash 2023, or archive dash 2024. The idea is that when you’ve taken your vacation, you no longer need it in your active notebooks. But you don’t want to lose track of it. Because you might want to reflect back on the hotel that you stayed in or that dinner that you ate. So you can put this notebook into your archive folder.

Next thing I do is I review my tags. Now my tags are set up around the people that I mostly interact with. And also tags for where I might actually do my work. Are they still valid? Do they still work for me? Or do I want to change them? Do I want to delete some? Do I want to add some

the next set of tags are associated with the way I get my work done. And I actually outline how I use these tags, in my course getting things done with Evernote, I don’t want to get too far into that right now those almost never changed because they’re loosely based on the Getting Things Done system. But all of these a tags associated with individual people are very important to me. So I’ve got to review those and see if they’re correct. If I decide that, well, Fred is no longer with us, but I want to you know, continue tags for the facilities manager, I can just go in and I can change the name of that tag. And I could call it Bob, the facilities manager. If you delete a tag, you’re not deleting the notes, you’re just deleting the tag. Now, of course, you’re also going to do other things that are not associated strictly with Evernote but play a role you want to check your email system, do you have anything in your email system that also deserves to be archived? You might want to go through each and every one of your notebooks and see if all of the files in your notebooks are still important to those notebooks? Or do you want to move those into your archive? It’s a good time also to think about how you use your system. My system has been in place for a number of years. So I’m not sure that I’m going to change this system at all. But I do find that I have to rethink how I use some of these concepts. Are they still as valid as they once were? Here’s a good example. So at one point, office only was an extremely important tag, because I left my home and I had a nine to five job. Well, I no longer work outside of my home. I have a home office for my consulting business. But I also teach at an area university so maybe I’ll want to add a tag for that university because it’s something I a task that I can only do at that university. That’s what kind of rethinking this I think is

It is extremely important and archiving the things that are no longer active, putting them into your archive folder, of course still keeps them accessible to you. You can still if you do a search on something, they’ll still turn up in your search engine. So that’s always important. You never lose track of anything. But you just want to make sure that these notebooks in particular but also these tags are relevant to the way you are doing work today and the way you’re going to do your work in the year ahead. The time spent cleaning up your Evernote account is worth it when you get back into your normal routine in the New Year. Happy New Year.