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What do you do with your bills, tax documents, Insurance Forms, and all those important papers that might pile up to be filed? Instead of letting them pile up, why not organize them in Notebooks in Evernote?
Here is an example of how I handle all my utilities bill. I have a notebook setup for each of my utilites: Water, Electric, Gas, Trash, Cable, and so on. Each time a bill comes in the mail (or via email) I use my phone to create a note in the appropriate Notebook and take a photo of the bill. I can then tag with a special system that I have found useful. The next section will detail this system of tags to help with getting all my ‘To Dos’ ‘To Done’.
Andy’s Tag System
After looking at numerous systems for helping organize all the things in your life that need to get done, I have settled on one system that is works in many situations:
First Create These Tags:
- .Who
- .What
- .When
- .Where
It is important to put the ‘.’ in there so that it will be at the top of your Tag List in Evernote. Next you will want to add the following tags nested in each category. These tags are open to your specific needs, however I have found that the following “.When” tags are extremely useful.
.When
Here are the tags I’ve created and some reasoning for each one.
- !Daily
- 1-Now
- 2-Next
- 3-Soon
- 4-Later
- 5-Someday
- 6-Waiting
.Who
These are typically people.
- Clients
- Family
- and so on
.What
These would be projects. For Instance I stick with this structure:
- .Active Project
-
- Project 2
- Project 3
- Project 5
- .Inactive Project
-
- Project 1
- Project 4
Once a project is done it can be moved from .Active Project to .Inactive Project with a simple drag and drop.
.Where
This is simple, and powerful. Where are you doing your task. If you are in a location, you can see what can be done there extremely quickly and easily. Here are some tags that I use.
- @Office
- @Phone
- @Computer
- @Errands
Reminder Feature
This is not a must use, but if you have a time sensitive task you can set a date to be reminded of the note. This can be very useful for follow-up on notes as well!
Putting it all Together
So here is an example of how to use these tags on a note for an Upcoming Project. We will call this project, Donut Day. This will be a day where 825 Technologies buys all of its clients its favorite donuts! For this project our first note will be “Call Dunkin Donuts”
Notice that we threw the following tags on: .Active Projects – because it is an Active Project, @Phone – because this is a phone call, and 1-Now – because I need to do it immediately.
The tags can later be pulled up through searches, so if I needed to know what urgent phone calls I need to make I can just search the tags 1-Now and @Phone. Then all those urgent phone calls would be listed out and ready for action!
Overall, the important thing is to organize your notes in a way that makes sense and that allows quick finding and access!
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