Spring Cleaning: Evernote @unclutterer

Evernote's premise is great. You put stuff into it, it remembers it. Search for it later and there it is.

Kind of like your own private Google. Especially if you use one of the paid versions which allows you to share stuff across lots of devices and search inside handwriting and PDFs.

What kinds of stuff? Photos, handwritten notes, audio recordings, forwarded emails, files and more.

Our family uses it a lot, kind of like a virtual filing cabinet. However, it can get unruly. So, my goal is to review stuff in Evernote once a year. It may mean nothing more than a quick glance, but it has allowed me to clean up some stuff and to delete other stuff.

My two-step process will help you to keep your Evernote tidy - ready to learn a manageable habit?

Step 1: Find all unreviewed notes. 

 Search for "-tag:*reviewed*"
Do this step every time you start.  Tag everything you find with "zzz - not yet reviewed"

What this search does: Looks for any items that do not contain a tag containing the word "reviewed" (for our purposes, we assume that the word doesn't appear in any tags outside of the ones we're going to use)

Step 2: Review 5 notes

Go to your tags selection and click on zzz - not yet reviewed tag to see all the notes.  Look at 5 or so. If...

...they're no longer useful: DELETE

...they're useful: tag with today's date, like this: "zzz - reviewed - 2018-02-24"

This is also a good time to update, combine with other notes, reach out to others if there's outstanding issues you need assistance with.  This should only take a few minutes each time you sit down to do it and you'll appreciate seeing things re-surface that at one time you felt were important enough to store in long-term digital memory.

Eventually, you'll have a list of tags holding items that have been reviewed and after a year has passed, you can start to review them, replacing the old "reviewed" tab with one with the new date.

Not using Evernote?

Here's my referral link.  Click that and sign up and they'll give you a free trial of the paid product (and give me credit towards my next payment).  Even if you move to the free product at the end of the trial period, I think you'll find Evernote to be a handy tool to helping you keep track of all the digital stuff in your life.