Get A Better Creative Workflow In Evernote By Ditching Tags

Tags can be useful for organisation but they can also get in the way of your notes. Maybe we should ditch using tags in Evernote altogether.

That’s the message from productivity expert Tiago Forte, who explains several disadvantages of using or, at least, relying heavily on tags:

When you rely heavily on tags, you have to perfectly recall every single tag you’ve ever used, and exactly how it is spelled and punctuated. “Parent” tags that create dropdown menus are no solution — that just leaves you squinting at a tiny list of options to choose from.

[…] As good as your brain is at recognising patterns, it is terrible at storing and recalling multiple patterns precisely since the patterns of neuronal activation interfere with each other. Yet this is exactly what you’re doing straining to remember the right tag. What a terrifically unnecessary expenditure of mental resources.

Forte also points out how annoying it is that creating a new tag is automatic when you start typing — even if you have a similar tag that might be only slightly different (misspelled, capitalised, plural and so on).

But the most important reason you might want to stop tagging everything is tags can make you feel less productive and creative:

The real problem with tags, and why they not only fail to help, but actually even hurt people’s creative self-esteem, is that they give the impression that keeping a useful collection of personal notes requires nothing less than a heroic feat of comprehensive planning, followed by years of meticulous, unwavering cataloging and annotating. Thus I see many creative people, justly overwhelmed at this task for which their minds are not well suited, give up on the idea altogether.

For much, much more on using Evernote to promote creativity, check out the link below.

Evernote and the Brain: Designing Creativity Workflows [Evernote]