Since my Recipe article last week, I’ve gotten to know a bit more about how you all use Evernote. Not unsurprisingly, I’ve discovered that not everyone clips notes in the same way. Some people toss everything into the same notebook, relying on the Search function to find things. Others are big proponents of tagging (even if they don’t do it as much as they know they should). Then there are those who organize their collections down to the point of having hyperlinked tables of contents. If the later intrigues you but you don’t have the slightest clue where to start; or you’d like to start using Evernote, but break out into hives whenever you imagine piles of unorganized notes, you’ve come to the right place. I’m here to help you throw some structure around those recipes, story ideas, and unruly notes.
The ability to create a Table of Contents wasn’t part of the original structure of Evernote; but was later introduced for the Mac and PC desktop clients. It’s a pretty brilliant way to easily organize and structure unwieldy collections of notes (like my 574-entry Recipe Book!).
In the desktop client, navigate to the Notebook you want to organize and select several notes. You’ll get a new dialog that lets you create a table of contents based on the selected notes. You might be tempted to select all your notes at once, then click Create a Table of Contents. Don’t! The purpose initially isn’t to get all your links into one note, it’s to get the TOC note started.
Once the new Table of Contents note is generated, it will pop to the top of the list (as long as you have your notes set to display by the most recently updated; if yours is organized alphabetically, you'll have to hunt for it). Incidentally, adding a leading “1.” to the title of the note will make sure it stays on top of an alphabetical list. I’d love to be able to pin the note, but that’s not currently an option.
A better alternative is to create a shortcut by right-clicking the note and selecting Add to Shortcuts. The Shortcuts list can be made visible in the left pane of your desktop client from the View menu. I highly recommend this route, as you can continue to be flexible with how you display your notes and still have access to your TOC, no matter where it is in the list.
Your new TOC note contains hyperlinks to all of the notes you initially selected (and makes plain all the times you ignored your own advice when creating note titles). Click them to jump to the note. Jumping back with a click can be achieved via the Shortcut you created. But if you’re in the iOS or Android app, that Shortcut menu is buried. The easiest way to maintain the same one-click navigation is to insert a hyperlink back to the TOC. Right-click your Table of Contents note and select Copy Note Link.
Then jump to one of the notes in your TOC (try not to drool) and paste it at the top of the note. Now you’ve got a convenient jump back to your Table of Contents.
Now that you’ve got the base, it’s time to throw in a bit of structure. Add some headings and move around hyperlinks from your list. Remember how I said not to select your entire notes menu? Once you have the internal structure of your note the way you’d like, it’s time to find notes to populate the categories. Select multiple notes (use the Ctrl key), right-click, and select Copy Note Link, just like you did when you were adding the TOC link to your notes. Back in the Table of Contents, navigate to where you want to put the new hyperlinks and paste them in. I’ve found that one of the best ways to easily alphabetize my lists is to let Evernote do the heavy lifting for me and have it display my notes in alphabetical order. Then I select my notes in order, copy the links, and paste them in to my TOC. They’ll paste in the order they were selected. As you add additional notes, they can easily be added to your TOC using the Copy Note Link function.
It’s a bit of work getting an unorganized note list structured into a Table of Contents; but you’ll find that the time it saves you down the road is immeasurable. Not to mention, a well-structured TOC enables you to share your recipe book with others and they can instantly use it without having to learn esoteric tagging or resorting to bulk keyword searches.
If you have an kraken-like notebook, chock full of unorganized notes, it’s time to tame the beast! Give me your best organizing tips in the comments.
