Evernote Tutorial - How to find your notes in Evernote - Tech Tuesday

Welcome to another Technology Tuesday. Today I'm talking about how to find your notes in Evernote. I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers, love you guys, Sarah, who wrote in to say, "I was curious in how you name your notes containing the receipts. I currently use Neat to store and organize my receipts and save important files/business receipts to Evernote as well, among other things. Do you add additional comments in the note containing the scanned receipt?" So this is a great question and one that really relates to, for me at least, how do I find the notes after I've scanned it in, right? You scan something in, you scan in a contract, an agreement, a business receipt, and you want to be able to find it later, right? That's typically the challenge that people have. So if you're naming it, what conventions can you use so it's easy to find it later on? There are 4 main ways to find your Evernote notes, okay? The first is through your notebooks. So your notebooks I treat as folders in my computer. Folders on my Gmail. I name them intelligently according to the category that fits best. So for example, I'll have a stack that will be called, um, travel, and under that I'll have various notebooks. So it might be honeymoon, it might be Europe cruise, it might be North American tour, whatever it is, all those notebooks separate, and then inside will be individual notes. So it's easy to scan and find those files that I need to get access to. The next one, the number 2, is naming your notes. And I will do this only when I plan to browse through on a folder-by-folder basis. So for example, I'm planning my trip to Asia right now, and I have a folder and it's called, you know, 2014 Asia Trip. And inside I might have, you know, uh, 25 notes. And in each one I've named it. So it might be, you know, the cruise ship, it might be Nagasaki, it might be Hong Kong, it might be Busan. You know, each city I have its own individual note for and all the information there. Because how I will access that information is I'll get my phone— I should have my phone with me— I'll get my phone and I'll pull it up and I'll scan from stack to notebook to note. So that'll be my process. It'll be easy to find that note, pull it up, and when I'm in that city, I can easily walk around and find the things I need to. When I'm dealing with business receipts or legal documents or any of that stuff, I think about again, how do I want to find this information? I'm not typically going to browse. Okay, I don't want to browse through my stack called business receipts and then browse through my, you know, notebook, which is, you know, maybe 2014 Q1, Q2, and then, then go find my individual note because it's too It's too laborious. When I want to find the receipt, I want to be able to find it. So I don't use that browsing technique. And since I'm not using a browsing technique, I don't use— I don't name my files on my business receipts. I just take a picture, snap, and I'm done. Mostly because another way is much easier to find those receipts. So I want life to be easy. I want life to be simple. And so I find that going through each note and then naming them With business receipts, takes too much time. Number 3 is tags. And with tags, you can add keywords to each individual note that you upload to Evernote. And I don't use tags at all. I started using it, thought, hey, this is a great way to find my notes. And I was, you know, tagging each one. If it's business, it might be the category of expense, or might be the, the type of expense. So it could be like from the government or could be from a specific store that I wanted to flag, but it's just, ah, it takes so much work, right? For me to do it, it's not worth it. It doesn't add enough value because I can again find the notes through other means. Number 4 is search. This is my favorite way. This is why I love Evernote, because it's so easy to find your files, your notes, through their search. And if I had only one method that I would use, it would just be be through search. So if I'm trying to find a receipt, the reason why I don't need to name the notes, the reason why I don't need to add tags, the reason why I don't really care so much about the category, you know, the notebook name, is because the search is so good. If I need to find a specific receipt, I can just type in Costco or Business Depot or Staples or McDonald's or whatever it is, wherever you're going, it'll pull up that receipt for you. And so I don't care about the other methods because the search is so good. So quick recap, there are 4 ways to find your notes. It's gonna be from naming your notebooks, naming the notes, adding tags, and the search. I only name— I will always name the notebooks because I find it easy to browse through them. I will only name the notes if I'm gonna be browsing through each individual notebook when I'm traveling, for example, but not for business receipts. I don't use tags because it's too much work, and I use search all the time because it's so valuable. So great question, maybe a little technical. Let me know what you guys think, if that helped or not. Leave a comment below. You have more questions, leave a comment, let me know. And if you like this video, you want to see more like it, subscribe to the channel. There'll be more videos coming soon. Believe. I'll see you soon.