TL:DR - I had 55K notes in Evernote; a literally unimaginable (for me, anyway) wide range of topics, in one main notebook (plus a few extras). My notes generated far too many hits from searches. So I branched out from a few notebooks to over 300, each focussed on the item, person, company or project that its content notes were all about.

To ensure consistency I mirrored the setup in Workflowy so it could act as a scratchpad when Evernote (as has been the case of late) is temporarily away with the flowers, and I could add notes and instructions about the admin of the database.

Using the left panel as an index, I've now listed my notes in Alpha order as child-nodes of index letters. So my 300-odd notebook/ nodes are a quick scroll away when I need to jump from |Amazon to |Zapier. In both Evernote and WF I've used a 'prepend' system (as just shown) to represent the main parent title and distinguish it from any other word which might pop-up in searches.

Linking and Mirroring are also much easier when you are looking for |Amazon (for instance) rather than just Amazon.








Workflowy (in case you didn't know) is an "outliner" app that allows you to create lists. The app window can look something like this:

If you're wondering - the 'x-words' here, separated by commas, are what I paste into a note tag field to generate separate tags.
Any item in that list can be both a detailed note, and a title for its own 2nd-child list; and any 2nd-child in that list can be a note and title for 3rd-children ... down -they say- to an infinite level of nth-child nesting.

Add in a range of tagging and text styling features, image and file atachments, a killer search engine, and the ability to seamlessly share the content of any bullet, or tree of bullets with colleagues, and you have a flexible and rather popular note-taking app.

I'm a long-time user, but until recently I was mainly focussed on Evernote, which is also a note-taking app. (It's been around for longer and I started there first)

But then Evernote changed its services, and suddenly I'm rather more involved with Workflowy and rapidly learning new tricks.

Which brings us to my 'indexing' tip.

The Power of Prepends

Like many WF users I initially managed my content on the fly; new bullets got added into a 'tree' of notes as whatever parent or child heading seemed sensible at the time. When I had a query or an edit, the excellent search function allowed me to turn up all relevant entries very quickly. But as more and more got added to the random pile, finding the 'right' entry began to get harder.

I had a bunch of notes on Evernote forinstance - fixes and work-arounds for various glitches I had encountered; but the word "Evernote" was a very common inclusion in dozens or hundreds of entries. Deciding what to do with the variously spread notes and how to combine them into a maintainable structure was... interesting.

What I came up with were 'prepends' (according to WF guru FrankDG!)

My Evernote 'great great grandparent' subject title note is actually |Evernote (note the "prepended" vertical bar) and when I search for that term in WF I either get just that one item only, or a list of all the instances of the word with my unique search term clearly visible, if not first in the list.

All the other instances where the word appears and the content is to do with Evernote are now hosted under |Evernote with an appropriate child-title. There's Support, listing the email addresses and ticket numbers I've been involved with; Resources, listing links to the add-in apps I use with Evernote (including WF); and Shortcuts, listing the keyboard combinations I use.

To further weaponise |Evernote I 'starred' that entry - which gets it a place in the left-hand panel of my window, and I hid that, plus all other entries beginning with "E" under another starred page which is just ###Notebooks so it stands out. You'll see a couple of images showing the results of all this below.

All of this gives me an index of all my interests in the left-hand pane of my screen so I can find existing entries and file new ones in a logical place very quickly.

Minor tweaks are:
  • that I have "|" topics solely about one person, company or application - hence |Evernote, and, similarly, |Amazon
  • "|!" items are about projects or activities that contain links relating to more than one topic. |!3DPrinting (forinstance) includes links to notes on my printer |Ender3Pro, my software |Fusion360 as well as direct links to several YouTube videos and other potentially useful resources. If and when I start to collect more information on any one, I’ll move links and notes into a stand-alone topic, and add a link to it from here.

(I should explain that I can 'mirror' a link to/ from any one of my topics, which means that there are two routes to my |Ender3Pro notes - either from the |!3DPrinting end or from its own title under "E" I can edit those notes from both accesses. I can also Link to internal notes or external apps and web sources.)

Bonus detail: when I add a new notebook in Evernote (because I also use the same structure there) I'll set the name up in WF first - | and copy/ paste that into Evernote's notebook creation process. Any general comments about that topic also go into WF - because it acts as a sort of index and user guide to my Evernote account. Searches in WF are very quick indeed (there's a lot less data here!) and if I add a direct link to my Evernote notes I can jump; straight into whatever I need.

OK - all of that seemed pretty simple in my head but probably got a little messed up in the telling. Hopefully the pictures will help. If I don't get buried in responses I'll happily answer any queries...

Using an alpha index I can quickly jump from one topic to another. The second view here, of an expanded category "E" gets me into a wide range of different areas, some of which are direct links to Evernote notes, or to web resources.