GTD Wannabe

My Massive Amount of EverNote Categories

There’s a post over at the EverNote support forum discussing the number of categories you can have and what happens if they get too big. I decided to count how many categories I actually use. It turns out that I use roughly 550!!! categories. Here’s a breakdown of where they come from:

• I use EverNote as my project support material holder for GTD. Each project has a category, potentially broken down into subprojects. Each (sub)project has at least one subcategory that holds supporting material, such as web clips, etc.
• Each version of a document that I’m working on has at least one category associated with it.
• Each article I read and take notes on has a category.
• I have several categories to support my GTD, e.g., @next, @postpone, etc.
• In addition, there are categories to hold things that need to be done, like @print, @cuecards, etc.
• And this doesn’t even count the many many categories I use to hold tips and tricks (one for each software package, one for each hardware issues, etc.), etc. etc. etc.

Finally, I’m just starting a new set of keyword categories that are not based on the GTD concepts, but are based on the content of articles that I’m reading. For example, if I read an article and find an interesting quote about “X”, I ‘tag’ the note with “#X”. Then later, I can pull together all of the interesting quotes about “X” by looking at the keyword category filtered on “#X”. I prefer to do this approach rather than searching later on, simply because I can determine at reading time what kind of ‘tags’ I want on each article. Searching later one would be complicated by the fact that not every article uses identical terminology. So far, I have about 20+ of these keyword categories, and that number is just going to grow.

I use my categories the way I use files in a filing cabinet, with two notable exceptions:

1. I’m starting to use shortcut categories more often, which I can’t do in a real filing cabinet.
2. I make serious use of keyword categories to pull in information from different places.

Categories: GTD, evernote