As discussed in Redesigning my Evernote – 1 – Basics, tagging is going to be an important part of the organization of Evernote, as it will be the “heart” of the system, apart from the notebooks.

First things first though: in the aforementioned post, I showed that I had to choose between two ways of organization, the first being per-company and the other per-year, and my last sentence was that I was leaning towards the per-year organization. After careful consideration, weighing options, and some playing around, I actually decided to with the per-company way of organizing, because it “feels” more natural.

That being said, after having been importing documents over the past few days/weeks, I am actually not quite sure yet what is going to be the most comfortable way to have it set up. One time I am thinking that I have chosen the correct way, the other time I am not too sure anymore. But let’s say that this keeps things interesting, and of course I will keep coming back to this in later times.

So, after all these ramblings, let’s get back to the main point of this post: Tags, and how to define a useful structure, at least, for me.

What I have come up with so far, and it is by no means complete, is the following tree:

• Administration
  • Accountant
  • Car
    • Lease
    •  Make/Model
      • License Plate
  • Company
    • A whole list of company names
  • Year
    • A list of years, to which the note relates to
  • Type
    • Contract
    • Correspondence
    • Important
    • Insurance
    • Invoice
    • Pension
    • Salary
    • Terms & Conditions
    • Ticket
    • Transcript
  • House
    • Streetname
  • <Name of company that I work for>
    • Expenses
    • Phone

And this is only for my administration. Also, I have a number of tags that I cannot really translate from Dutch to English, so I did not put these in here.

Anyhow, the idea is that each post gets, at least, the following tags: type, companyname and year. As you might have noticed, the companyname tag is kind of duplicate, as my notebooks are already named after the company that the note is related to. The reasoning behind this is that I want to be able to switch over to a different kind of sorting system, if I want to. I have also found out that I want to add my name and my spouse’s name to the list of the tags, so that I can differentiate easily between, if I ever decide to put it all together in a big yearly notebook, which does seem tempting at times.

I will come back in a different post and elaborate a bit more on my system, but first I need to figure it out a bit more myself 🙂