“Paint house) nests inside !Someday and not inside "Projects. I do not use tags such as !Soon or !This Week, because !Tickler serves that purpose for me.Īll projects (e.g., "1Actions, "Talks, "Photo Book) are nested inside the parent tag "Projects.Ī someday/maybe project (e.g. The title for each note tagged with !Tickler begins with the date I want to be tickled, formatted as YYMMDD which allows them to be sorted with today’s items appearing at the top. !Tickler is my tickle file and began as a separate notebook until I found it an unnecessary complication. !! allows the two top priorities to appear at the top. My priorities are !!MIT (for Most Important Tasks), !!Today, !Next (for Next Actions), !Someday (I dropped /Maybe), !Tickler, !WF (for Waiting For).Įach priority stands alone, i.e., it doesn’t nest inside a parent tag. No symbol-prefix allows my Filing Cabinet to appear at the bottom of the list of tags. No symbol-prefix for my Filing Cabinet and everything that I store inside of it. Tags: 4 symbol-prefixes that sort the same way on each device and function like folders, except that a given note can appear in multiple folders: GTD The notebook where all my post-inbox workflow takes place.
With !Inbox as my default notebook, I can assign appropriate tags, make needed edits, and then drag note to the GTD notebook. If I have GTD as my only notebook, any new note would disappear from view when I assign the first tag to it. !Inbox The symbol-prefix "!" allows this notebook to appear ahead of GTD. Here my current line up of notebooks and tags. My main challenge was to settle on symbols for my tags than sorted the same way on my iPad, iPhone, and MacBook - no easy task, given that they sort differently on the different devices.Īs I’m still an EN newbie, my system remains a work in progress. I also found Daniel Gold's "Evernote: Unofficial Guide 2 nd Ed." and various blog posts regarding EN's tag sort order helpful. Recently while setting up Evernote for GTD, I frequently read of the importance to keep it simple. Note links are HUGELY useful for the mixed setup I use now. On the other hand, I much prefer project level support in Evernote. I need to set up a large number of saved searches for all the different filters that make sense to me within Evernote, whereas these combined filters are better supported in the ToDo app. If I am trying to focus on my work, and sitting at the computer, I find it really useful to filter actions on both _work and (my AoF tags have a leading underscore). But AoF tags are also useful when getting things done. In weekly review, the Areas of Focus are very useful, and both apps can support filtering accordingly. My ambivalence about 100% Evernote versus a mixed system stems from my need for different features. Also, our systems make use of the organizing categories, and keep notebooks for reference. Appigo's ToDo also allows tagging, and the only tags I have in the AppiGo ToDo app are AoF tags, so I can retain the same focus in both ToDo and Evernote. Our systems share a tag for Area of Focus.
I prefer several aspects of our systems (yours and mine) to Dan Gold's system. But I'm thinking of moving entirely to Evernote, along the lines of what you describe. So my workflow runs from !inbox to !support to reference, even though my action lists are kept elsehwere. I do something extremely similar, except I've been tracking the actions themselves in a different app (AppiGo's ToDo), and using Evernote for all the support work. The weekly review process is easily done by selecting workflow and organizing by tags, or just selecting all the related tags for the different levels. General Reference saved search contains all the reference items besides the support files, easily viewed A-Z or filtered by Area of Focus. Project support gets its own tag, and so does Calendar support. This is really nice because I can select an area of focus, choose workflow and see my related projects, or choose reference and see my material for that AoF.
Items are tagged with either an Area of Focus, or an Interest tag Waiting items, someday/maybe tagged accordinglyĮvery non-actionable item goes into Reference. Projects are tagged with !Project, and an Area of Focus tag I find this system to be easy, intuitive, and simple, and I like the lack of punctuation in the saved searchesĮvery actionable item goes into Workflow.
Make sure to see the PDF for am overview of the parts, and below for how I use it. Hello, Ive been working on a photo guide of how I use Evernote for GTD.