When Evernote founder Stepan Pachikov first launched the app to take notes, his goal was to help us "remember everything". Now, with more than 225 million users worldwide, it is a modern problem that needed a solution, and Evernote is doing a good job in this regard.
However, recently users are surprised by reviewing their oldest Evernote notes. Some were only one or two years old, but they can barely remember saving them. There were very prominent articles that users remember not having read, and notes of books they had forgotten to read.
The problem: memory and memory
People spend a lot of time consuming and meticulously organizing the information, however, many retain almost nothing.
So, there is a simple solution that you can easily replicate. The two immediate benefits of this Evernote workflow are:
- The most important information will remain in your mind.
- You will not waste time on interesting and important information, just to forget it shortly after.
Are you interested? Follow these steps and you will have the same system set up in no time. All you need is an Evernote account, a list of tasks, an application or a calendar that can send you recurring reminders.
1.- Create a label for the content you want to review again
The first thing you should do is create a new tag so you can tag your important content. And then find it easily again.
For this purpose, tags are better than laptops, because you can tag content without having to move it into your Evernote account.
To create a new label, open Evernote. In the menu on the left, select Labels and then select New Label. Give the new label a relevant name like "Re-visit the content" and press Enter.
2.- Save the label as a shortcut
Now, click and drag your new tag to the shortcuts section of the menu on the left. This way, it will only take a single click to directly access the notes you need to see again.
3.- Label your important notes in Evernote
Now for the time-consuming part (depending on how many notes you have in your account). Check your Evernote notes and label the important ones, which you would like to revisit regularly, with their new label.
When you review your notes, use the new tag only for the most important notes you have saved. It is unlikely that you will need to revisit receipts and photocopies of the documents you have saved.
So don't waste your new tag on them. This is because you don't want to feel overwhelmed with the amount of notes you need to recheck.
Although this may take a while, you only have to do it once. After this step, every time you add a new note to Evernote that you consider important enough, label it as a review. In a short time, this will become a habit, and keeping abreast of your new system will not take time at all.
4.- Set a reminder to review your notes
Now you will have to make sure that you actually revisit these important notes. The best way to do this is to set a reminder so that it can be part of your agenda.
Evernote has a built-in reminder function for Premium users, but this only works for individual tags, so it is not useful in this case.
Instead, if you use a task list application that has a "reminder" function for recurring tasks, create a recurring task to review your Evernote notes.
If you don't use a task list application, set up a recurring event on your calendar to repeat. It can be every day, every week or every month, for example.
Regardless of the method you use, you should make sure that you will really see these notifications. So you are asked to revisit your notes.
5. Start reviewing your notes
When the time comes to revisit your Evernote notes, all you have to do is open that tool. Click on its Content Review shortcut and then sort your notes by Edit Date and from Less Recent to Most Recent.
Sorting your notes by less recent to more recent, means that the articles you haven't reviewed in a long time will appear at the top of your review list. Now, start working on your important notes one by one, starting at the top of the list.
How to do this depends on you. Read them in full. Also, check out the notes. Read the best moments. You do not need to review all your notes at once. You can choose to recheck only one note per day. Maybe 10 minutes per week. Or 20 minutes per month. What works for you.
At this point, it would be recommended to add the date at the top of each note after you have reviewed it. Making a small edition like this ensures that Evernote classifies the notes correctly next time.
When you go to the next note, the one you reviewed previously will automatically move to the end of the list. Which will be ready to be reviewed again in the future.
If you find a note that you no longer need to recheck, remove the "Content Revisit" tag. If a note is completely obsolete, delete it.
6.- Keep repeating this in Evernote
It's as simple as that. By keeping abreast of this simple routine and developing it as a habit. All that important and insightful content that you have been saving will remain in your mind much more than you think.
An alternative option
There is another solution that also works quite well. RandomNote is a free web application that displays a random note from a specific notebook in your Evernote account.
If you decided to save all the notes you want to revisit in a separate notebook, this could be quite useful. However, as it is more advisable to use labels instead of notebooks, this solution has limited use. Although you should consider it as an option, just in case.
An additional use of RandomNote is to use the service occasionally to display random notes from your Evernote account, so you can delete those that are no longer relevant. This is an efficient way to help you keep all those notes up to date.
Keeping Evernote as a useful application
The purpose of everything mentioned in this article is to help you get some use of the information you store in Evernote. Instead of letting the application run out of nothing.
And finally, being able to revise important information is a vital part of this; as is also removing obsolete content. And with the system described above, this should be easily achieved.
But remember, the more you use and trust Evernote, the more important it is to keep your account for this application safe and backed up.