My Evernote System: How I (Used to) Organize, Tag, and Triage 10+ Years of Notes

Evernote was my primary system of record for over a decade. Everything — ideas, tasks, travel info, reading notes, system designs — went into Evernote. I had a detailed structure, tagging conventions, note lifecycle rules, and even triage folders for determining what would end up in my portfolio.

That system still exists... But I barely use it now.

What Changed?

A few things:

• ChatGPT became my go-to scratchpad — It’s faster and more natural to just ask GPT to remember something or help me reformat it. Even quick things like “remind me where I parked” now go into a ChatGPT thread. (Yes, it’s harder to retrieve later — but for quick tasks, speed wins.)

• I replaced Evernote's inbox system with my ChatGPT Queue Workflow — When a ChatGPT conversation produces something worth acting on (even months later), I email myself a link with a short subject line. It’s fast, cross-account, and lets me decouple capture from categorization.

• My projects became more structured — Most of my active work now lives in Trello boards, markdown files, code repos, or dedicated tools. There's less unstructured note-taking.

• The Evernote UX never evolved enough — Filtering is still too limited (no NOT or OR tag logic), and syncing across devices — while reliable — isn't compelling anymore.

When I Still Use Evernote

Despite its decline in my workflow, I do still dip into Evernote for:

• Referencing old notes from years past — it’s my deep archive
• Very specific recurring workflows I haven’t migrated yet
• Searching past thoughts when I know I wrote it down somewhere and don’t want to re-think it

But that’s about it.

A Snapshot of the Old System (for posterity)

Details

Click to expand old system description

Evernote has been my primary method of organizing everything* in my life for over a decade. I would be seriously devastated if I lost access to my Evernote account, or if Evernote lost my notes(for whatever reason). They do have an export functionality, but you can only export 100 notes at a time, but I digress...

I have used several different strategies for organizing my notes over the years. I started with notebooks, but then ran into issues when I wanted to nest my notebooks several levels. After searching around on the forums I found that tags are actually the primary method of organization. I'm glad I embraced tags, that said, I feel like even my system for tagging is evolving.

One downside to Evernote tags is the lack of filtering flexibility. You cannot filter by NOT or OR, Therefore I cant do stuff like:

• tagged biology OR anatomy
• NOT tagged as Portfolio_hasBeenPublished

General Gripes

Internal note id is not easily accessible:

• when using the windows native app
• when searching (in the web app, normally it's in the url, but not after you search then select)

PK_ToDo

Pros

Evernote gets syncing right... this is the real benefit that caused me to stick with them. I rarely ever have note versioning or lost note issues, and I use Evernote across many many devices.

Tasks

Evernote also has this concept of tasks - which are added to notes. You can also add due dates and make these tasks repeatable. I usually have around 10-20 different notes that I use to organize my tasks, and all these notes go in a tasks folder:

Note Organization Process

All notes in Evernote are now categorized by note lifecycle:

Whenever I edit a note, add a 'modifiedUnpublished' tag if the note is already tagged with 'hasBeenPublished'. This tells me that I need to update the note in my portfolio.

If the note does not contain the hasBeenPublished tag, then I don't need to do anything (because it should already be in 1. Notes (Untagged, Unpublished) or 2. Tagged folder.

After a note is published or the decision is made to exclude it from my portfolio it will be tagged appropriately AND moved the the appropriate folder.

Notes included in the portfolio must be: tagged with Portfolio_hasBeenPublished and placed in the 3a Portfolio hasBeenPublished folder

Notes NOT included in the portfolio must be: tagged with Portfolio_ExcludeForever and placed in the 3b. Portfolio ExcludeForever folder

Notes where I have not decided whether or not I want to include will go into the Portfolio_Undecided

I have decided not to include the last update date in Evernote, BUT this does exist on the docusaurus side, so do not forget to add/update this tag when publishing

On a regular basis I should look in

1. Notes (Untagged, Unpublished)
2. Tagged folders

And clean them out. Once a month maybe?

I also have folders and tags: PrtYes_Incomplete_WIP PrtYes_Incomplete_ToRevisit

Any note that I have decided will go to the portfolio but is not ready to be transferred will go in one of these folders. If I am actively working on it (as with the cmake notes), then it goes in the WIP tag & folder. If it is an old note, then it goes into the ToRevisit tag & folder

I feel like this will be good for organization. So I can keep my "New" notes and "New but Tagged" Notes, separate from my "decided whether or not these should go to the portfolio or not" notes.

The numbers are important. While I can move a note directly from 1 to a 3 bucket, I would never go backwards from 3 -> 2, 3 -> 1, or 2 -> 1

Auditing will occur by looking in a folder and seeing if all notes are tagged correctly. If they aren't then I know I have messed something up and I will double check the appropriate places (portfolio, whatever) (Maybe I accidentally created a note in this folder and it hasn't actually been published to the portfolio)

Important: While I do use my evernote account for "everything", I obviously do NOT add anything to my personal account from my employer/client when I have dedicated hardware/accounts from them. In these cases there are a variety of systems I use... everything from Notepad++, to OneNote, trello, teams, etc. it really just depends on the client/employer and what they are using.

Final Note

Evernote still holds a huge part of my digital brain — just not the active part.

I no longer depend on it. But I’m still grateful it carried me this far.

And yes... I still occasionally export backups — just in case.

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Evernote has been my primary method of organizing everything* in my life for over a decade. I would be seriously devastated if I lost access to my Evernote account, or if Evernote lost my notes(for whatever reason). They do have an export functionality, but you can only export 100 notes at a time, but I digress...

I have used several different strategies for organizing my notes over the years. I started with notebooks, but then ran into issues when I wanted to nest my notebooks several levels. After searching around on the forums I found that tags are actually the primary method of organization. I'm glad I embraced tags, that said, I feel like even my system for tagging is evolving.

One downside to Evernote tags is the lack of filtering flexibility. You cannot filter by NOT or OR, Therefore I cant do stuff like:

• tagged biology OR anatomy
• NOT tagged as Portfolio_hasBeenPublished

General Gripes

Internal note id is not easily accessible:

• when using the windows native app
• when searching (in the web app, normally it's in the url, but not after you search then select)

PK_ToDo

Pros

Evernote gets syncing right... this is the real benefit that caused me to stick with them. I rarely ever have note versioning or lost note issues, and I use Evernote across many many devices.

Tasks

Evernote also has this concept of tasks - which are added to notes. You can also add due dates and make these tasks repeatable. I usually have around 10-20 different notes that I use to organize my tasks, and all these notes go in a tasks folder:

Note Organization Process

All notes in Evernote are now categorized by note lifecycle:

Whenever I edit a note, add a 'modifiedUnpublished' tag if the note is already tagged with 'hasBeenPublished'. This tells me that I need to update the note in my portfolio.

If the note does not contain the hasBeenPublished tag, then I don't need to do anything (because it should already be in 1. Notes (Untagged, Unpublished) or 2. Tagged folder.

After a note is published or the decision is made to exclude it from my portfolio it will be tagged appropriately AND moved the the appropriate folder.

Notes included in the portfolio must be: tagged with Portfolio_hasBeenPublished and placed in the 3a Portfolio hasBeenPublished folder

Notes NOT included in the portfolio must be: tagged with Portfolio_ExcludeForever and placed in the 3b. Portfolio ExcludeForever folder

Notes where I have not decided whether or not I want to include will go into the Portfolio_Undecided

I have decided not to include the last update date in Evernote, BUT this does exist on the docusaurus side, so do not forget to add/update this tag when publishing

On a regular basis I should look in

1. Notes (Untagged, Unpublished)
2. Tagged folders

And clean them out. Once a month maybe?

I also have folders and tags: PrtYes_Incomplete_WIP PrtYes_Incomplete_ToRevisit

Any note that I have decided will go to the portfolio but is not ready to be transferred will go in one of these folders. If I am actively working on it (as with the cmake notes), then it goes in the WIP tag & folder. If it is an old note, then it goes into the ToRevisit tag & folder

I feel like this will be good for organization. So I can keep my "New" notes and "New but Tagged" Notes, separate from my "decided whether or not these should go to the portfolio or not" notes.

The numbers are important. While I can move a note directly from 1 to a 3 bucket, I would never go backwards from 3 -> 2, 3 -> 1, or 2 -> 1

Auditing will occur by looking in a folder and seeing if all notes are tagged correctly. If they aren't then I know I have messed something up and I will double check the appropriate places (portfolio, whatever) (Maybe I accidentally created a note in this folder and it hasn't actually been published to the portfolio)

Important: While I do use my evernote account for "everything", I obviously do NOT add anything to my personal account from my employer/client when I have dedicated hardware/accounts from them. In these cases there are a variety of systems I use... everything from Notepad++, to OneNote, trello, teams, etc. it really just depends on the client/employer and what they are using.