If you use Evernote, you're probably sick of managing hundreds, if not thousands of notes and all of your notebooks.
Well, in today's video, I wanna show you five tips to help you be more efficient and effective with managing all of that reference material, meeting agendas, thoughts, whatever you capture here in Evernote, I want you to do it faster.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
Tip 1 Create Note Links
So let's get started with tip number one and first off, we are gonna take a look at creating note links and what that is is creating links between one or more notes here within your Evernote notebook.
So in this example, I've got a link here that says review new artwork for Google ad. And if I click on that, it's gonna take me directly to another note that I have here within Evernote.
This can be really handy if you want a high-level note in one area of your notebook and maybe you wanna drill down to some more details with other notes within Evernote.
So how do we create this?
Well, first of all, let me delete this for an example and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start with the note that I want to reference.
If I right click on any note, I'll get this menu and I want to choose Copy Internal Link.
By selecting that, I've copied that link to the clipboard and now I can go up to whatever note I want.
Let's go back to this one as an example and I'm just gonna hit paste.
Now, you'll notice that I don't get a lot of gobbledygook like you see up here like you would typically see if you were just pasting a web URL.
But no, this link is clean. In fact, this link is the title of that particular note.
So now I can just click on it and go directly to that note elsewhere within my Evernote account.
It can be really, really helpful.
Tip 2 Create Table of Contents
Let's stay with making these connections and next up what I wanna do is show you how to create a table of contents because maybe you'd like to see a summary of a number of notes within a single note.
Now, you're probably used to managing your notes within a notebook and you probably have a lot more than what I have listed here in my sample account, but maybe you don't wanna manage all of those notes within tags or within their own dedicated notebooks.
Maybe you just wanna reference let's say three or four different notes. So in this case, what we're gonna wanna do is multi-select.
So on the left-hand side here, I'm gonna select these three notes here. I'm just gonna hold down Control on my keyboard and you can see I get a bit of a snapshot of what those notes contain here, but down below the great thing is is that I've got a number of additional options available to me.
And in this case, what I'm gonna select is create table of contents note.
Now, just before I do this, I wanna make sure that you're aware this is not going to delete or remove or change the location of these three existing notes, but it's actually gonna create a new note.
So if I select this, what's gonna happen, I'm gonna scroll up to the top and here you see I have a new note which is called table of contents. But when I click on it, now I've got note links directly to those three notes. It's even added numbered bullet points here to the left. So I can click on any one of them and go directly to that given note.
Now, you probably wanna change the title of this from table of contents to something more relevant, but this can be especially helpful when you are creating for example a meeting agenda and maybe you've got five or six or seven items that you wanna talk about, but you don't wanna list them all within the agenda here. Maybe you just want the bullet point name and then you or members that you're working with can drill down and select that link and then go to the desired note.
So there's one another thing I wanna show you here when it comes to multi-selecting notes here. And we're not talking about just applying tags to different notes. If let's say I take notes one, two, and three, again I'm gonna click on one and then I'm gonna hold down Control to multi-select. I'm gonna add three in this case, but you can actually merge your notes as well.
Maybe for example I've been taking notes about the same idea or the same thought or topic at different times, but after review I've realized you know what, these shouldn't be in three separate notes. These should actually be in the same note. So now that I've got the three selected here, I'm gonna select the merge button and what this is gonna do
Tip 3 Merge Notes
It's gonna take those three notes and put them into a single note.
Now, you can see that there's a header here that is gonna give us the name of the note up here. It's gonna also say the author, who created this note in the first place.
So you can see what is going on and the separation between these three notes. So now I've got them all contained in one note. I don't just have to lump them in within the same notebook. I can see them all right here.
Now, there's one word of warning with merging. There is no capability of undoing this action. So for example, I can't just click on this and say, well, let's go back or actually no, I didn't mean to do that. Can we hit undo?
If I go up here to Edit and say Undo, it's not going to undo it. So before you select that merge button, make absolutely sure that you wanna combine those notes together. But when you do, you're gonna have them more conveniently displayed to you in a single note.
Tip 4 Shortcut Keys
All right, let's move on to tip number four and this is gonna save you an awful lot of time and that has to do with shortcuts and hotkeys.
So if we go up here to the top of our menu and if we select Tools, we wanna then select Options. And when the Options dialogue opens up, we wanna go about halfway down and select shortcut keys.
Now, first off, you're gonna wanna review this and see the number of actions you can perform just by using these shortcut keys. I think probably the most obvious one or the most helpful one will be the first one, create a new note.
But if you don't like this particular key combination, you can just delete it and create your own combination you can use. Maybe there's something a little more convenient to you.
But the other bonus of using global shortcut keys is that you can use these as long as the desktop version of Evernote is open. So you don't have to be viewing this. As long as it's open in your taskbar in your system tray as it states here, you can use these shortcut keys and they will be applied.
Let me show you just a quick example of this one in particular Control + Alt + N. So if I come out of here and just say Control + Alt + N, boom, exactly, I'm gonna have a fresh new note that I can start editing right away. So much easier than always having to come up here and select new note depending on where my mouse is and depending on how many monitors you may be using at any given time.
Tip 5 Advanced Syntax
Now, my fifth and final tip today also has to do with saving time and this one in particular has to do with searching notes, but using some advanced syntax so you can narrow down your search and get to the note that you are looking for.
You're probably already familiar knowing that by typing in a keyword here, you can quickly find something. If I say, I don't know, let's say the word review for example, I'm gonna find every single note that has the word review in it somewhere. Not just the title, but within the note itself.
But what if the note that I'm searching for I know it has review in the title and that's the only one I want. Well, we can use some special features here. In this case, we can use the term intitle. So if I use the term intitle and now I enter in the word, I'm gonna say review, I only get one search result because this is the only one right now that has review in the title. I can narrow it down that much more.
Let me show you two more that I find very, very helpful. You might be using a checklist for some of your Evernote processes and some of the things that you're doing on a day-to-day basis. Here's my office supplies list. If you wanna look for things that have a to-do list or a checklist, what you can do is use the syntax todo and then you can choose either true or false. So if I type in the word true, what it's gonna bring back is any of my notes that has at least one of the checkboxes checked off. Here I've got three in this particular case. So this is the only note that's coming back to me.
If I back up and say todo false, what's gonna happen is I'm gonna get a few different notes come back. I'm still gonna get this one because in this case, it's gonna show me every note that has a checkbox, at least one checkbox that is unchecked and that's the case here. I've got a few other documents here that have things that are unchecked. So I can search just by the status of the checkbox.
The last one that I wanna show for you here is created or updated. So if you're looking for something and you say, I know I created it within this timeframe, you can type in the word created, then start with day. Now, if you say day, it's gonna bring back everything that is today and I like how Evernote always shows you in sort of an easy-to-read manner as to what you're actually searching for.
But don't stop just there. If I say day minus three for example, it's gonna bring back everything that's been created since three days ago which in this case was November 26. So you can get really granular here. You can use created. You can also use updated because those are two different things of course what you're searching on here to be more granular and get specific with what it is you are searching for.
Well, I hope you enjoyed those five tips to get more out of Evernote and especially to help you save time. Now, I'd love to learn from you next what are some of your time saving tricks or techniques for getting the most out of Evernote. Be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thanks again for watching and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
