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Evernote Tips and Strategies for Organization | Webinar Training Video

Beginner's guide to organizing notes in Evernote. Learn best practices for organizing your notes using notebooks, stacks and tags. Watch now. Strategies and Tips for Organizing Your Notes in Evernote


In the first, and most watched #GetUntethered Hangout on Air, Stacey Harmon and Kristi Willis present the basic strategies and tips needed to organize you notes in Evernote. If you struggle to bring effective organization to your Evernote account, this video is a must see. 
Learn about the relationship between notes, notebooks, stacks, and tags and the options for creating organizational structure in your own Evernote account. The organizational structures and philosophies of the Untethered with Evernote co-authors are expanded on as each walks you through why and how they organize Evernote as they do. Great Evernote debates such as notebooks or tags are addressed and discussed (hint: Stacey and Kristi disagree on this one!) and viewer questions are answered live.

Original Air Date: June 2014
Platform Demo: Evernote for PC and Evernote for Mac App

Topic Roster by Time:
[3:46] Getting started with notebooks
[4:31] Organizing your notebooks and notes
[6:21] Kristi's approach to organizing notebooks and notes
[10:06] Stacey's approach to organizing notebooks and notes
[15:54] Stacks vs Notebooks
[16:51] How to create a stack
[20:11] Client Case Studies
[33:08] Advantage of using Evernote Business
[36:25] Archiving old notebooks and notes
[40:08] Internal Case Study


Stacey Harmon: Welcome, everybody, to the Untethered with Evernote monthly hangout. This is our June hangout. We are your hosts, Kristi Willis and Stacey Harmon, co-authors of Untethered with Evernote: Tips & Workflows for Independent Entrepreneurs. We're coming to you from Austin, TX. We wanted to start a monthly discussion about items related to helping you get untethered.

I am Stacey Harmon, one of your hosts. I'm principle at Harmon Enterprises. We help business owners who are ready to bring digital transformation to their business, and certainly, that includes Evernote. So I do a lot of training and consulting. No doubt about it, Evernote is my most important piece of business software. My love of Evernote has really driven me towards becoming both an Evernote Certified Business Consultant and Evernote's Marketing Ambassador. Kristi, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Kristi Willis: Hi, I'm Kristi Willis, also co-author of Untethered with Evernote. I am the Freelancing Ambassador for Evernote, as well as an Evernote Business Certified Consultant. I wear several different hats in my company, K.W. Solutions Group. We work with businesses to help them implement better workflows and technology. I am also a writer. I write about technology and about food. You'll see those examples come up in lots of different places. So that is my story. As Stacey mentioned, welcome to the hangout. We have a couple of different ways for you to ask questions of us today. So you can either ask in the Q&A pod, which should be showing in your hangout, or you're also welcome to ask on Twitter, participate in our ongoing conversation on Twitter with the #GetUntethered hashtag. We'll be monitoring that today as well. So to kick us off, I think Stacey has a couple of little details about some things coming up later in the hangout, and then we'll get going from there.

Stacey Harmon: We're going to give you an opportunity to ask questions during the hangout, but I wanted to let you know that at the end, we're going to give you an opportunity to gain free access to some expanded book resources that are going to guide you through the details in writing, third-party tools like using [00:02:26] or Live-Minutes, detailed description of the almighty web-clipper. It's one of our favorite tools. We're not necessarily going to focus on that in this particular discussion, we're going to talk a lot about strategies for organizing your notes and notebooks. So one of the things we're going to do is make sure that our conversations are really focused around particular Evernote skills to help you get as untethered as possible, and as up to speed with the various powerful options that Evernote offers you. Stay tuned until the end and we'll tell you how to get access to that resource, as well as a code to get you a 10% off our book at the end. So hope you stick through. Let's go ahead and get started, Kristi. Why don't you tell us how today's topic is going to go and what we really need to know to organize our notes in Evernote.

Kristi Willis: Great. Today we are going to be talking a little bit about organizing your notes in Evernote. Let me just back up just a little bit. This can be a place that some people really get hung up with Evernote. They are not sure how to organize everything and then they get a little overwhelmed. As many of you who are experienced users know, by default, when you start with Evernote, you have one notebook. It's typically brilliantly named with your name, but then from there, you can create whatever notebooks you want. Every time you create a note, you have that ability to say where you want to store it - so what notebook you want to use - give it a title. That title is really meaningful because it's helpful when you search. Then you have the note body, which can contain text, or audio notes, or pictures, all different types of things. That's true, whether I'm using my desktop or my mobile device. You can see I have an iPhone. So here's a quick snapshot of what it looks like from my mobile device. So one of the important decisions becomes, "How am I going to organize these notes so that I can find things again?" Luckily, the search feature in Evernote is extremely powerful, and you can very easily find things using keywords in the notes. But for some people, they really want to be able to organize their notes in a way that they can find things manually as well. So here's a shot from my PC. A disclaimer, I'm a complete nerd, so I have a PC and a Mac and all kinds of devices.

So here's a shot of part of my notebook structure for my PC. You can see I have several notebooks for key topics. In this snapshot, you can tell which ones are shared with other people because they have a little people icon on them. So that I have my notebooks grouped together in a way that makes sense to me, I can use stacks, almost like a bookshelf, to group them together. So you can see I have a Business stack here. Then I have a Kristi stack at the bottom. That's a personal stack of things that I want to keep up with. One of the great debates among Evernote users is, "Do you have lots of notebooks or just a few?" This is a great debate. If you've read the book Untethered with Evernote, you know that Stacey and I have this great debate because we have really different styles. Stacey likes lots of notebooks and I like fewer notebooks, an approach I call the "fewer bigger buckets." If you're using fewer notebooks, how are you further being able to find things? So that's one of the things that you would want to think about as your'e organizing your notes. Do you like lots of notebooks, where maybe they have fewer notes in them but you know exactly which notebook to go to? Or, in my case, I prefer to have fewer notebooks, but then I use tags and keywords to keep up with the different projects inside those notebooks.

So here's another newer snapshot of my notebooks from my Mac. Here, what you can tell about my notebooks is who I'm sharing with, but also, you can see which of my notebooks are business notebooks. So I've recently migrated to Evernote Business. Those notebooks that are a part of the business structure are stored in those business notebooks. Those are the ones that appear in light blue and have the little building icon next to them. So that's kind of a different view. None of this is my complete structure, but you can get kind of a feel for it. Then here is a snapshot of my stacks. So again, I don't like to have a ton of notebooks and a ton of stacks. I like to be able to get to things very quickly. So I have a few stacks. I have one for finances, one for personal things, two stacks for my business. What I've done is I've separated into my general business stacks, that's kind of the internal work of the company. Then I have a separate stack for my clients. I like to travel a lot, so I have a separate stack for that, and then some archive stacks. So again, I try to keep it pretty tight, pretty structured, so that I have less places to look. You'll get to see Stacey's variation on this approach, as well. What that means is that if I'm going to have fewer notebooks, I need a way to be able to find things quickly within those notebooks. So I do use tags quite a bit. Tags are keywords for your notes. They typically are going to be words that might not appear in the note otherwise. If it would appear in the note otherwise, then I don't really need the tag because it would show up in search. But here, I might want to be able to use tags.

I'll show you a great example of how I use this regularly. One of the ways that I use this is for story ideas. I write for several different outlets, including my own blog. I'll see something and go, "Oh, that's a great idea for a story," or "Wow! I'd love to write a story about that." It may fall in one of many categories. I write in tech and in food, but I want to review those story ideas regularly, to see what I want to pitch to the different outlets. So regardless of whether it's tech or food for a magazine or for my blog, when I add a story idea to Evernote, I use that story ideas tag, so that at least once a month, I'm going in and being able to quickly pull those up with a tag search. So that's one of the ways that I use this. For one of the magazines that I write for regularly, Edible Austin, I create a new tag for each issue and every interview, every piece of research, all of my little scratch notes. All of those get the tag for that issue, so that I can quickly pull them together. That's been the way that I have been able to manage. For me, that works for my flow. It works better for how I think about things and how I organize. So I use, again, fewer notebooks, fewer stacks, but I'm using tags to cross keyword things across notebooks or across stacks. So that's one approach. I'll turn it over to Stacey, so she can talk a little about her approach.

Stacey Harmon: Let me show you how I manage things. So my approach, I love notebooks. Sorry, I'm trying to make sure you can see.

Kristi Willis: We can see.

Stacey Harmon: Okay, good. Okay. My approach is I love notebooks. I think they're great. Prior to Evernote, I had extensive manila folder organization in my desk. You know, I was always organizing by manila folders. So that is really kind of engrained in how I think and how I'd like to reference things. When Evernote came along, it certainly restructured that, but I still like to have this grouping of items in notebooks that I think are really going to work for me. Now, because I love notebooks, I have a lot of notebooks. If you're a free or premium user, you're going to reach a notebook limit at some point. I solved that by coming an Evernote Business user, which gives you a greatly expanded notebook avenue. But I like to create notebooks. Now, within that, I do create some organization through stacks. So I group my notebooks into stacks that make sense to me. I follow a GTD, or Getting Things Done approach. It's a productivity philosophy popularized by David Allen. I have deployed GTD in my Evernote. Through these stacks, you'll see that they kind of follow a flow. I rely heavily on naming conventions, in order to create a priority to these things, as well as keep them easily accessible. The benefit of having this in Evernote versus having it offline or in my desk is, again as Kristi mentioned - if my mental system of saying, "Okay, go to that notebook to find something in Evernote fails me - the search feature of Evernote is so powerful that I can pull it up and find what I need when I need it. So I love my notebooks. I use stacks to keep me sane, and notebooks and naming conventions are a real key for me.

Your stacks may be very different than mine, but the stacks are going to save you. If you look at one of these stacks, say my 7 stack where I keep all my reference materials, this is really a digital filing cabinet where I keep absolutely everything related to my life, that's not actively referenced by me on a daily basis. So you can see that I have lots and lots of notebooks. I just collapse a stack in order to really simplify the view that I see. For me, I don't use tags. They're very rare. They're very specific in how I use my system. It's very project related. I might use it for short term to identify certain notes that I want to be able to pull quickly for a particular purpose, and then I'll clear the tag. So unlike Kristi, I don't use them in my day-to-day management very often, but I do use them for very specific reasons. Naming conventions, very important, as I mentioned. That pulls through not only in my notebook structure, but also in my notes. So here's two examples, one from the book on the left. It shows that we use the naming convention to identify and sort the order that notes appear in the notebooks. The left example is from the collaboration folder that Kristi and I did when we were planning the book. On the right, this is more my lead management process, where I use a naming convention and a precursor, an actual code name, to identify and, again, help me control the sort on different notes that I have in my overall system. So hopefully that gives you an overview. You can see that clearly we have different approaches. I've got a very granular, notebook-oriented structure. Kristi's got the bigger buckets kind of approach. But we're open to seeing if we've generated any questions at this time about that.

Kristi Willis: While we're waiting for a question, I did fail to mention there are, of course, times that I do create new notebooks. I'm not notebook opposed. There really are three questions that I ask myself about creating a new notebook. One is, do I have significant enough volume of notes to require a new notebook? If that answer is yes, then I might move things to a new notebook. The second would be, do I need to share it with someone else and do I want to limit what they're seeing? The third would be, do I want it available offline? This is a premium feature, but if I want to be able to work on my notes or see my notes when I'm at the gym, when I don't have wifi, or when I'm on an airplane, then I might separate that into a different notebook so that I have it available offline. So those are really my three key considerations.

Stacey Harmon: Those are excellent because those are actually the strategic underpinnings of developing any system. So if you can kind of answer those questions, then you can flow out your process and system from there. So Kristi, we've got a couple of questions that maybe you'd be great at trying to address. Just backing it up, we don't want to assume that our audience actually knows about stacks, and what they are. There are some in the audience who have never used stacks. Can we explain how it differs from notebooks? How do you create a stack?

Kristi Willis: Sure. So a notebook is similar to the spiral notebooks or the three-ring notebooks that we used to have, except for now they're electronic. They actually contain notes, and so they can contain few notes or many notes, but a notebook actually contains notes. A stack, on the other hand, is really just a way for you to organize your notebooks. So you don't put a note in a stack. It's literally like a shelf on a physical bookshelf, where I'm going to say, "Oh, I want all these notebooks together, so I'm going to put them on the shelf together." That's what a stack is like. So I'm not actually storing notes in a stack, I'm just arranging notebooks in a stack. The way that I create a stack is when I'm in my notebook view. Should I demonstrate this, Stacey?

Stacey Harmon: Yeah, that'd be great.

Kristi Willis: Okay, great. So I'll just do a quick screen share. I have Evernote loaded, as always. Let's see.

Stacey Harmon: I'm coming from a Mac perspective, so I'll just put that disclaimer out there. But when you're creating stacks, it's a very drag-and-drop oriented approach. Kristi will illustrate this, but when you're in a notebook view - which you get by clicking on the notebooks on the left hand side - you can then create stacks from individual notebooks by simply dragging and dropping a notebook over another notebook. Evernote will collapse that and allow you to rename the title of the stack. It will inherit the name from one of the notebooks that you are dragging and dropping, but you can then customize that. We're going to talk a little bit about this in the use case, as we move forward. This is a user-level control. So each individual user can create their own stacks. So even if you're sharing notebooks, Kristi's stack can look different from my stack, in terms of the name and what notebooks are in it because it's a user-level control.

Kristi Willis: Stacey, I'm ready to demonstrate whenever.

Stacey Harmon: Okay. I'll let you go ahead.

Kristi Willis: So here's a perfect example, at the very top of my notebook. I've just gone to the notebook view here. I have two notebooks that are set up individually. I can create a stack out of these. I can do that by taking this one notebook, Current Projects, and dropping it on top of my .Inbox. Notice that created an .Inbox stack. It's being cranky, hold on. It got swirly. My little Mac is misbehaving, of course. But then I don't have to keep that stack name, I can rename it. In my case, I had those at the top and so double clicking opens it up. I want to rename my stack right here, so I just right click. I'm going to rename the stack. Now it has those two notebooks in it. They're at the top because they're going to be listed here alphabetically by default. Then whenever I want to see it, I can expand that out. I can view the notes in each notebook or I can view all of the notes in both notebooks. I can see all the notes in that stack together. But that's an easy way to create a stack. It's to drag a notebook on top of another, rename the stack however you like, and then you're ready to go.

Stacey Harmon: Yeah. This is actually another fundamental for creating organization in your Evernote account. It's very flexible. If you want to choose to change your stacks in the future, you just drag and drop the notebook into another stack. I call them the essential skills that you have to have, in order to develop a system in Evernote that's going to work for you. Kristi, do you think we're ready to move into one of the case studies?

Kristi Willis: Yeah, I think it would be great to show how you're putting this together with one of your clients. So why don't you take that away?

Stacey Harmon: Okay. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to give you guys a case study about how we used notebooks, tags, and stacks, to create two separate workflow solutions for a client of mine. The point that I wanted to bring out here is that - and Kristi and I, we whole-heartedly believe this, which we didn't actually say it - we don't think there's a right way. Your way is the right way for you. Okay?

Kristi Willis: Well, actually, to be clear, we both think we're right.

Stacey Harmon: That's really the way to look at it. But the point is when you're developing Evernote solutions to run your business, whether it's just you, or you're working with a team, or you're working with maybe 30 people, you need to keep in mind some of these underlying questions so you can craft a solution that works for you. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen with you, and give you some tips from a client case study. Okay. So I was working with a client and they had a workflow process that they wanted to re-engineer. We ended up not using tags in this particular scenario. But we did go through a series of questions. As we go through this list of questions, you can think about how you would apply these to whatever your workflow scenario is.

First, how many notes in Evernote are you trying to track per entity? In this case, they were trying to track license agreements, actually, a type of license agreement called a permission. So they were trying to track some contracts and some negotiated items. The reality was that for this particular case, there were not a lot of documentation that went around that. There was basically one note or maybe three notes per entity that they were trying to track. Those things could be easily merged, etc, but it wasn't a lot.

The other question that we wanted to ask, as Kristi highlighted earlier, is permissions. Who needs to see the data? Who should be able to access it? Are you going to be sharing it a lot? If you are, are you going to be sharing it internally or externally? In this particular case, the answer was that it was going to be done internally. Not everyone in the organization was going to need to see it or should see it, but we solved that in a different way. The people that needed access to it were in a particular department. So everything was done internally. That answer may vary, depending on what workflow you're working through. The other issue is the duration of access to these notes. As time goes marches on, should we archive these? Do we still need access to them? What's going to happen? In this case, they really just needed to reference it, but they don't really have to actively have it as part of the system. So in their particular case, we decided that the status of the project, how could we track these contracts and these permissions, is we're going to create a notebook to manage this case. We are going to have, I think, four notebooks. The users are going to move the notes through the notebook system, as the status changes. So this is one option for you. As the status goes from incoming, or negotiation, to active, to declined, or archived, you just move the note through it. We decided not to use any tags, but we did define a naming convention that was system-wide, so that the note title was communicating to all the users in the system. So here's an example of it.

The notebooks we used are four-fold: Income, Pending, Declined, Approved. We wanted those to appear in a certain order, so we used an underscore and a period to help control, and again, used a naming convention to game Evernote, and display the information in the notebooks in the order that we wanted. Then you can see a clip there. We created a template that describes how the system is to be used. When people create new notes, it's to be proceeded with that code, which stands for permission. They follow it by a space, the name of the company requiring the permission, and followed by the date. So they're all uniform and they're all the same. They will all look the same, but the status is defined by which notebook they are in. So hopefully that shows one scenario. No tags. We're tracking status. We have a workflow, as it moves through these various notebooks, which if you're not already familiar, it's very easy to move a note from one notebook to another. There's a variety of tactics for doing that. We talk about those skills in the book. We can move those things through the system.

Kristi Willis: Stacey, can you clarify. In that example you're almost using the notebooks like someone would have in the old days. We would have used physical trays, you know, in and out trays. But now, because we want to be virtual and we want to be able to include people across geography, you're able to do that with the Evernote notebooks instead of physical trays.

Stacey Harmon: Absolutely, that's a great parallel.

Kristi Willis: I love that example.

Stacey Harmon: Yeah, so it's very simplistic. And again, it's contingent, if we back up to these questions, is there wasn't a lot of things. There wasn't a massive amount of data we needed to track. We didn't have to give access to one notebook or client and not another. We were able to then kind of work them through this traditional workflow system. That's a good way to look at it. But let's contrast that to a more complex system that they have. So I asked them the exact same questions. In this particular case, this was actually kind of a full-blown license agreement and negotiation with multiple parties that generated a lot of e-mails, a lot of paperwork, a lot of things that were getting scanned, a lot of research that was happening on the web, a lot of parties involved. So it was more complex, and the quantity of notes per entity that they wanted to track was very high. There might be a couple hundred notes per entity and per license that they're negotiating. So that's a very different answer and it impacts the solution and the workflow that we set up for them. The other thing is, who can see what? There's certain deals that certain sales people should see and other sales people shouldn't see. So we needed to separate out the different items so that access could be controlled to those notebooks, and to the data. We also needed to share with remote people who were working on these contracts, attorneys, sales reps, staff internal.

So there were a lot of complexity in sharing options that we had to consider. The duration of the access was a little different in this case, too. Once something is archived, really the manager needed access to those things. But the people who were working on it, once a license expired, they didn't need access to it in their system anymore. So we needed to figure out if they should leave or join. We wanted to fold that need into our system. The process that we decided and the solution and workflow that we decided is that we're going to decide and create one notebook per entity. The status of their workflow is t's not being tracked by the notebook as it was in Case Study A. It's going to be tracked by tags that were assigned to notes in the notebook. We had to create an internal system where every notebook has a summary note that acts kind of like a table of contents. The internal rule, you have to create this system and procedure that somebody needs to follow all the time when a new notebook is created. The tag that tracks the status gets assigned to that note. So this allows, then, what Kristi does, where she does a tag search to find particular pieces of information. You can then do a search in Evernote that says, "I want to see all of the licensees that are in progress." You can do a search for that tag and it will pull it, regardless of what notebook it's in.

So this is a very different solution. We're tracking the status based on the tags and the tags need to get updated as the status changes. But it creates a very notebook heavy structure. So here's a screenshot showing the multiple notebooks that were created for this client. There's going to be hundreds of them over time. Each notebook follows a naming convention in itself, plus the client name. Sales people, as you're working on it, can join or leave the notebook as they are needing access to it. [inaudible 00:30:14] done with tags. So we created this business process where it's either a lead, pending, active, denied or archived. That will be assigned to the summary note in each of the notebooks. Okay? So you can see that even within the same organization, we might use different strategies for organizing Evernote. In Part A, we're using a notebook structure akin to the wire desktop receptacles that you used to have, versus having the tags manage the status. That's all within the same organization. So this is one of the things we have in our book. We have a series of untethered tips. A couple of untethered tips that really matter in the design of your system, is that you need to remember that notebook stacks, which Kristi illustrated how to create, are user specific. So each user can create their own stacks, without impacting the underlying shared notebook.

Notebook names can also be customized by their users, in their own particular view. So what this means is you have to create a naming convention, particularly when you're using Evernote Business, which is a different version, a paid version, $10 a user a month, for businesses to create this structure. You want to pay particular attention to these naming conventions, but know that the users, once they join the notebook, can actually override the naming convention to something that might make more sense to them. That's getting into advanced skills and such, but certainly something to consider if you are Evernote savvy, designing a system for your business, and using Evernote Business. Let me just show you, I forgot I had this one screen here. So what that shows is, if you're using Evernote Business, you can see here on the left, when users join the notebook, they have all the notebooks visible in their particular Evernote account. But they can go in and then create stacks around particular statuses and make it more into a fluid workflow, if that makes logical sense to them. So it's just one option, but it gives a lot of users flexibility and allows you to have each of your individual team members organizing Evernote in a way that's going to be most affective for them.

Kristi Willis: Great, thanks Stacey. We've had a couple of questions that I thought - before I jump into my next slide - that I would address for folks. One of them was around business. You addressed the cost, which is $10 per user per month. But they also asked what the advantage of it is. For those who are newer to Evernote, there are three different versions. There's the free version, which you could use forever, and is always available to you. There's a premium version that for $5 a month, or $45 a year, you are permitted a larger note size. You're permitted more storage, as well as you have the ability to collaborate with people and share notebooks. So for example, Stacey and I could share a notebook and we could both make edits into that notebook. So that's a premium feature. If you're not using it for business, for personal life, that can also be very helpful if you're trying to collaborate with people in your family or friends. And then the business level is the newest level. It's about a little over a year old.

What that allows you to do - in our case, Stacey and I both switched to Evernote Business - is it allows you to keep the notes of the business with the business, even if employees leave. So Stacey and I both have an assistant  - separate assistants - and we're all creating notes in our different notebooks. If we add new people to the company, we have the ability for them to see those notes. But if people leave the company, the business notes stay with the company's store. So the advantage there is I don't have to worry about, "Oh, so-and-so left and they took all the notes with them and now I don't have access to them." So it's really giving you that business structure that would you need. That's the advantage of doing that. It also allows you to have many more notebooks than you would. There's a limit of 250 notebooks for a personal account, but for a business account, you can have more notebooks and you can share those with people as they need. You can join those notebooks as you need. Stacey, do you have anything to add to that?

Stacey Harmon: You covered it really well. I think about the key benefit of Evernote Business is that the business retains ownership of the data notes and controls access to and from users. So that can be very beneficial as your business grows and you develop systems, and centralize it all in one spot for your people that come and go.

Kristi Willis: That's perfect. Somebody did ask, they said they found it a little confusing that you can have 250 joined or owned notebooks, but there are 5,000 maximum notebooks for the business. What that means is just because the notebook is out there for the business doesn't mean that I have to be connected to it. So at one time, I could have 250 active notebooks. I always like to think of this as a physical example of I can have 250 notebooks in my office, but I can have 5,000 notebooks total. So out in the warehouse, I can have another 4,750 notebooks filed away that I can go get as I need and rejoin as I need. But I'm limited to 250 notebooks in my current physical space. Is that how you would describe that?

Stacey Harmon: Yeah, you got it!

Kristi Willis: All right. The one other notebook related question before we go into another case study was about old notebooks. The person who asked the question may have seen this when they went into my screenshot. I don't like to have my old notebooks in my current flow. So I actually created a stack called ZZ archives, so that it would be at the bottom of my stacks. I put old notebooks that I'm not working with regularly, in there. So for example, clients who I may not be working with now or I had a blog that I've discontinued, so notes from that could go in there. So that's been my strategy for doing that. Now that I have Evernote Business, I could just not be joined to those. So that would be another way to deal with that. But before I had Evernote Business, the way that I dealt with that is I had an archive stack that appeared at the bottom. Stacey, how do you deal with that?

Stacey Harmon: Well, I think it's worth noting that there's actually not a note limit in Evernote. You can have as many notes in Evernote as you want. What you're limited by, depending on your version, is how much data you can upload on a monthly basis. If you are ever to reach that cap, it resets in a month. So the reality is if you reach that cap, you're probably happy to pay an extra $5 a month to use Evernote, which is what it would cost to get past that cap for a month. But you have no limitation as to the number of notes that you can store in Evernote. So having said that, you don't have to be concerned about necessarily deleting notes. You certainly can, but my strategy, as you saw, is I have a digital stack of reference materials. I have individual notebooks that I just move into that location, so that if I ever want to pull out those documents, I can, at any time. I have also heard one other strategy, which I think is kind of interesting. You can create a single notebook for archive notes or old notes, and use a tag to really be able to find those quickly. Maybe use an archive tag or an unneeded tag or something along those lines. And also, don't be afraid to delete notes, you certainly can delete notes. If they're not needed, you can delete them.

Kristi Willis: I don't keep my old grocery lists, I delete them when I'm done. I can make them in Evernote. We did have someone ask if this is being recorded and it is. It's a hangout on air, but it will be available through YouTube. We'll be posting that link after the hangout, but it is being recorded. So if you can't stay for the whole thing, feel free to review the recording off of YouTube after the fact. We just have one more stack-related question that I thought we might address before we go into the next round. Somebody asked if you can create a stack on an iPad or an iPhone. To my knowledge, on any of the mobile devices, you can't. I haven't used the Blackberry in a long time, or the android, but at least on the iPhone and the iPad, you can't create stacks. So there are still a few features that are only available on the desktop version or the web version, and that, to my knowledge, is one of them. Stacey, do you have any other info on that?

Stacey Harmon: You got it.

Kristi Willis: Okay, perfect. So just keep asking questions in the Q&A pod, or on Twitter, and we'll do our best to address them. We did want to show you one other example. I've got a case study for you too. Stacey's was working with a client and mine is an internal project that we have just started here at KW Solutions Group. We are starting a cookbook that will be published early next year. We recently started the planning for that and had a little retreat to get that going. As is my nature, my default was to start with just one notebook, and everything was going to go into this 2014 Cookbook Project notebook that is shared with my coauthor Lillian Sonenburg, and also with our photographer. I was just happy as a clam that we had this one notebook. But then, as we got to talking about the project, we realized that we needed to be able to share the recipes with individuals who might be testing just one recipe. That was easy to solve because we could just e-mail it to them. But we also need to share with some reviewers of the material, all of the recipes. So that they could look through and give their perspective on do we have enough seasonality? Do we have the right dishes? Does anything kind of not work for them? To do that, I really needed to be able to share the whole notebook, and not all of them are Evernote users.

And while I'd like to require them to be Evernote users, it doesn't feel like I can do that. So the best way for me to share that with them is through a public notebook. The problem is, when I created the cookbook project, I created a business notebook. I want those planning notes and all of the thinking that goes into creating the cookbook in a business notebook. I want it to be part of the business store. But when I make a business notebook, I can't share that publicly. So that's one of the things to note about business notebooks. They cannot be shared publicly through that public link. So I went ahead and created a second notebook just for the recipes. So we now have a notebook just for the recipes. Notice that it's a personal notebook, so it doesn't have that business icon there. That not only is shared with Lillian and our photographer Sandra Ramos, but we will be able to share that with different reviewers and they will be able to see all the notes, or we can e-mail individual notes to people, as well. So that was kind of our first hurdle with this. The second is that by the time it's all said and done, we're going to have about 124 recipes in the book. We need to be able to keep up with what stage are they in. Are they being revised, developed, tested? Are they complete? As well as the cookbook is organized by season, so what season are they in and are they part of what we're photographing or getting a photograph of?

We went back and forth about, "Are we just going to use tags? Do we want to just use naming conventions? What's the best thing to do?" After playing with it a little bit, what we decided on is a two-pronged approach. So we are using a naming convention for the title of the note, to tell us it's status. This corresponds with a spreadsheet that we have, that we can keep, kind of cross-compare with for our planning stages, as well. But that status tells us where it is. So if it's been tested and it was successful, we would then change that status to the next phase. Or if it's been revised and it's now ready for testing, again, we change that status to test. So that gives us a way to quickly pull those notes of, "What's in test? What's in revise?" We can do that with the search, and by putting test in the colon or revising the colon. It gives us a really clean search. The other two items, the season and whether it's being photographed or not, we decided to do with tags. The reason for that is there are some things that are not recipes, that are processes that are also being photographed. I wanted to be able to pull those, not from the recipe book, but from the other project notebook.

Using the photo tag made it much easier to pull those from both places because as a writer and a blogger, you can imagine I have lots of things that have the word photo in them. So the photo tag made it really easy to pull from both using a tag search, and to be able to see what's still outstanding. So that is our solution, and again, we've used a couple of notebooks, a naming convention, and a tag. It really took a couple of different conversations about, again, those key workbook questions: who's going to be involved? Are they an Evernote user? What do they need to be able to see? How are they going to access it? What do we need to be able to pull? What searches do we need to be able to do? I'm sure that over the next 8 months, as we're finishing up this book, this will evolve a little bit more. But this gives you a great example of how we used that notebook, tag, and naming convention for an internal project. And again, kind of key untethered tip there is that those business notebooks can't be shared with a public link. So if you need a public notebook, create a personal notebook to be able to do that.

Stacey Harmon: We're going to give you all an opportunity to actually connect to a personal public notebook at the end, where we've created some additional resources for you guys to get trained and get further untethered. So you'll see that in action and can experience it for yourself from a joined capacity.

Kristi Willis: Great. We did get a question about that. Somebody asked: Can you convert a business notebook to a public notebook later on in the process? Do you want to take that one, Stacey?

Stacey Harmon: We probably answered it fairly clearly. You would have to create a separate notebook. Make it a personal notebook, and then share that notebook publicly. You could certainly move the notes from the business notebook very easily into the new personal notebook, but that would be how you'd handle it. Kristi's case study kind of illustrates that really well.

Kristi Willis: Yeah. I learned that lesson the hard way when we were going through our Evernote Business Consultant certification process. I thought I was being so bright. I created a business notebook to contain my class examples and then realized I couldn't share it with my colleagues. I ended up having to create a new notebook, move those notes over there, etcetera. So it's always a little bit of a learning process. But you know, if you think about it, it makes sense. If it's part of the business store, you wouldn't want somebody to inadvertently share publicly confidential notes. So it makes sense to me, kind of why that feature is limited there. It just was an interesting lesson to learn.

Stacey Harmon: Yeah. It's one of those things that when you know it, you're becoming a real Evernote power user because you can design workflows and communications with a variety of people, understanding the constraints of the system. So it's one of those details that make a big difference.

Kristi Willis: Exactly. To that end, when you find yourself in that scenario and it's something that you normally would have had as a business notebook, that instead you're going to do it as a personal notebook so you can share it publicly, be really thoughtful about whose account that business notebook or that personal notebook goes under. So in my case, we're creating it under my account because it's my company. My personal notebook is always going to be available as long as the company exists. So that makes sense for it to go there. I wouldn't want to put that burden on Lillian, where if she created the notebook, we'd then have to figure out a way to get it to me if for some reason she decides to go do something else, which she's not going to do. Lillian, in case you're listening.

Stacey Harmon: That's actually a really excellent point. Also, I would like to clarify too that it is possible, in reverse, to take a personal notebook and convert it to a business notebook. It's not the same skill that we're discussing, but that is something to note. That if you do create a personal notebook and change over to the business version, there is a conversion process to facilitate that.

Kristi Willis: Great. That's great. Excellent.

Stacey Harmon: Well, we definitely good on time. Keep your questions coming. Did you have anything further on that, Kristi?

Kristi Willis: No, I'm good with my case study. So this is really that time that we had carved out for Q&A, if anybody has any other questions. Or do you have something else to add?

Stacey Harmon: So we're happy to take some questions. As you can see, this is our first Google hangout. Our intent is to do these on a monthly basis and talk about one specific topic. So we hope today we've enlightened you on the opportunities using notes, notebooks, stacks, tags, to craft workflows that are going to support your business. We have some additional resources. We're going to give those out in a couple of minutes so that you can get access to continuing opportunities. Our book discusses 15 workflows and details out what Kristi does, what I do, and how our different approaches really impact that, as you saw. As a reminder, she's a bigger buckets kind of approach and I'm a more of a notebook, detail, lots of notebooks. Notebooks make me happy, happy, happy. So there are differences. There's not a right or wrong. We're both correct. How about that, Kristi?

Kristi Willis: I like it. I like it when we're both right.

Stacey Harmon: Okay. All right.

Kristi Willis: The other thing I would mention is Stacey and I use this everyday and we also both teach classes. So we're trying to find that happy medium for the new user as well as the power user, so definitely either through e-mail, Twitter, our Facebook group, Google Plus, you name it, and Stacey's going to put all the addresses up there in a little bit. Let us know if you're looking for something more advanced or if you're looking for something a little more basic. We're trying to go kind of to the middle, which of course makes everyone a little unhappy. But let us know what topics you're interested in, what you want to know more about, and what level works best for you. We really want this to be a conversation with folks on a tool that we both find extraordinarily helpful.

Stacey Harmon: Yeah. I think what we'll do right now is, let your questions roll in but I'm going to give you guys access to some resources and then we can certainly answer any lingering questions that come in. We're going to keep these to an hour, so you can expect that. We'll stop right at the hour mark. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen, and give you guys access to a couple of additional things that we think will be really useful to you. Hold on just a second, learning the ropes here.

Kristi Willis: Hey Stacey, we do have a question that came up. Somebody asked, "Is there a resource to see example templates for notes in Evernote?" And there is.

Stacey Harmon: This is a perfect lead in to what I was going to suggest. So if you go to getuntethered.com, this is the site for our book. If you go to our Newly Launched Resources tab, there is actually a process for joining our public notebook. Kristi illustrated that concept. In there, we actually provide a couple of templates for you, for conducting meetings, which is something that all of you probably do at some point or another in your business life. We'll be adding to that over time. You know, tell us what the needs are and we're happy to adopt the resources to meet those needs. We're also going to be blogging here at Get Untethered, so there's going to be an ongoing conversation effort into the evolution of the book and the community of readers. So that's the first resource, so go there to getuntethered.com, to the resources tab, go join our public notebook, and that will get you access to some templates. So that's the first resource. The next thing I wanted to tell you about is, we have, again, an ongoing discussion.

You know, Evernote is constantly changing. Workflows are constantly changing. Technologies outside of Evernote are constantly changing. All of these things effect our environment and we are very interested in discussing how to get untethered in our life. So we have the hashtag #GetUntethered, to try to centralize all of these conversations across these different channels. If you aren't already a member of our Facebook group, please request to join there. That's the name of the community. We're also on Google Plus, as you probably know. That's how you found this hangout. And the Google Plus page pairs with a YouTube channel, which is where this hangout will be visible. So it's a Get Untethered YouTube channel as well. We'll post the URL to that in the Facebook group. So the Facebook group is really where the day-to-day live conversation is going on. If you're inclined to participate in that, we hope you'll join us there. You can also follow us Twitter or on the website, obviously, as well.

Kristi Willis: I want to add that in the Facebook group, many of the other members are adding their best practices, their templates, and it's really become quite the active community. So if you are interested in different best practices and ways that people are using this, the Facebook group has become a very active community for that.

Stacey Harmon: It's a great way to reach both of us as well. So hope you'll join us. We wanted to thank you for hanging out with us this first time. We have a promotion code for the book. If you haven't already purchased it and are interested in getting yourself even further untethered and learning a little bit more about our perspective, you can get the book at getuntethered.com. That code, JuneGH, for google hangout, JuneGH, is valid through the end of the month, and will get you 10% off. We're really thrilled that the book is now available in both a PDF or ePub format. You can buy either directly from our website. You can also get it on iTunes. The discount code does not work on iTunes. You need to buy the ePub through our website in order to capitalize on the discount code, but wherever you'd like to purchase it is up to you. Kristi may kill me for saying this but the Mobi version will be coming at some point in the next couple of weeks. No pressure, no pressure.

Kristi Willis: I promise that it will be available by the July hangout.

Stacey Harmon: Okay, so that's our goal. But for now, these are your options. We'd love to hear what you think and how we can continue to support you in your effort to get untethered. So that's our offer for you. We also want you to save the date because as we mentioned, we're going to be doing these on a monthly basis. We will be re-hanging out on July 17, 10 to 11 central standard time. Our topic for next time is going to be around leads and business cards. You may have heard that Evernote and LinkedIn recently announced an integration. There are some really powerful things that Evernote can do to manage lead generation, lead tracking, as well as just overall networking. So we're going to give you some tips and strategies around that. As always, you'll be able to pre-ask questions on the hangout, once we've created it, which we will do very shortly. Feel free to RSVP and let us know what your questions and interest is, around that topic. Anything to add to that, Kristi?

Kristi Willis: No, just that I'm very excited about this next topic, as are several people from the Facebook group who specifically asked about this. That business card feature is just so much fun. I can't believe how much that's changed how I feel about going to conferences and conventions and those big meetings where you come home with a stack of cards. I used to just look at those with dread. Now, I just love how Evernote's made it so easy to manage those. So I'm very excited about our next topic.

Stacey Harmon: Yeah. That'll help you digitize your contacts right away. It's jaw-dropping, some of the power that can come from that. We'll try to illustrate that for you and make you super savvy in all of your networking needs. So with that, we're happy to take additional questions but this is our individual contact information if you need to reach us. Obviously, there's lots of ways to connect with us. But we've got 2 minutes for additional questions. Is there anything we haven't covered? Let's see.

Kristi Willis: The one thing is I don't think we thanked Emma, who has been helping us drive this Google Hangout earlier. Emma, thank you for helping us with that. She's been making sure that we had the questions at the forefront, and that everything was working great in the background. So thank you, Emma, for your help with that, and getting us kicked off with our first hangout.

Stacey Harmon: Yes! So I think that's pretty good. It looks like we've covered everything. If you have additional questions just join the Facebook group and put them there, or write it on one of the channels to reach us at. We'll tweet you back. And with that, we thank you very much for your time. I hope you got a lot of value out of it. We hope to see you again next month, and talk to you online in the meantime. So signing off from our first hangout. I think we did it, Kristi!

Kristi Willis: Yay! Go get untethered!

Stacey Harmon: All right, thanks for watching. We'll talk to you next time.

Kristi Willis: Bye.
