When you’re dealing with multiple projects at once, things can get complicated—fast. It’s hard to know what needs to happen next, and important details can fall between the cracks. Now there’s an easier way to keep your projects under control.
Enter the filtered notes widget. This addition to the Home dashboard allows you to choose from a selection of filters to see exactly the notes you want. If you’re subscribed to an Evernote Professional plan, you can see multiple filtered notes widgets simultaneously. This can give you an instant overview of any project or workflow—transforming Home into mission control for all your major workstreams.
Whether you have multiple projects at work, a mix of work and personal projects, or you use a productivity method like GTD, the filtered notes widget unlocks new potential for Home as the one must-see view of your active projects and deadlines. Use it to get oriented at the start of the day, and to stay organized for the rest of it.
Your projects, at a glance
Customize your filtered notes widget to display the most relevant notes for any given project, so you can quickly see its current status and take action, all from your Home.
For example, if you’re looking for new clients and need to contact leads, you could create a note for each potential client then apply the tag “leads” to each of these notes. When you set up your filtered notes widget, filter by the “leads” tag, and the widget will populate with all the right notes. When you convert a lead into a client, remove the “leads” tag from their note, and it’ll no longer show up in the widget.
If tagging isn’t your thing, no problem. You can filter by plenty of other criteria. If you like adding keywords to note titles, set a keyword filter. If you’ve been using that keyword for a while and only want to see what’s relevant to what you’re working on right now, then set another filter by notes you’ve updated recently.
Power tip: While there are many filter options to choose from, use the fewest number of filters possible to get what you want. The filters act as “and” operators (not “or” operators). This means that the more filters you add, the fewer results you’ll see.
Work. Life. Balanced.
Tired of personal projects getting pushed aside by what’s going on at work? Make your next personal project just as prominent on your Home dashboard as your top professional priority.
For instance, if you want to start remodeling your bathroom around the same time that you’re preparing a big proposal, you could set up a filtered notes widget for each of these projects.
Let’s say you have a notebook titled “Personal Projects,” where you’ve been adding notes related to improvements you want to make around the house, including your bathroom remodel. The filtered notes widget can save you from having to sift through that notebook to find what you need. Set up your widget to filter for notes located in your “Personal Projects” notebook with the keyword “bathroom.” As long as that keyword appears somewhere in each relevant note, they’ll all appear in your widget.
Create a similar widget showing only the notes you need in order to draft your proposal at work. This might mean filtering for notes that contain the word “proposal” or adding a “proposal” tag to all the notes with relevant information and then filtering by that tag in your widget.
Once you’ve set up your personal and work-related filtered notes widgets, arrange them prominently on your Home dashboard, right alongside related information from other widgets like your calendar or scratch pad, to make both projects easier to tackle.
Power tip: The Evernote Professional plan also lets you use Boolean and geographic search. This means you can have a filtered notes widget that shows notes based on the location they were created, using geodistance syntax or based on combinations of keywords and other criteria, using Boolean operators like “AND”, “OR”, “NOT.” You can even use parentheses for grouping complex conditions. Learn more about advanced search syntax here.
Fit your workflow
Some tasks require you to track multiple points in a workflow and to reference various types of information every step of the way. This is where it can help to have different filtered notes widgets, each one dedicated to a different stage in a process.
Imagine you need to hire someone at work—a new account rep. Filtered notes widgets can help you track and manage the hiring process, right from Home.
Start by creating a filtered notes widget for each stage in the process, like “Review Resumes,” “Phone Screenings,” and “Interviews.” Then create a tag for each of these categories and apply it as a filter in its corresponding widget. For example, you might apply the tag “resume” as a filter in your “Review Resumes” widget, and so on.
As candidates apply, create a note for each of them that includes their resume. Then add the “resume” tag to all the notes with resumes you need to review. Now they’ll show up in your “Review Resumes” widget—giving you a list of everything you need to review, front-and-center in Home.
Like someone’s resume and want to do a phone screening? Simply replace the “resume” tag in their note with the “phone screening” tag, and your widgets automatically update to reflect where that candidate is within the hiring process—showing you what you need to do next and putting the info you’ll need just a click away.
But what if you need to hire another account rep in the future and want to use the same tagging process, but you don’t want all the info from the previous hiring process cluttering your results? Add a filter for notes you’ve created since your most current candidate search began, say, in the last two or three weeks.
Power tip: Use any saved search to quickly set up a filtered notes widget. Let’s say you’ve searched for the term “account rep” before and refined that search with carefully chosen filters. You can apply that same saved search when setting up a filtered notes widget, so it instantly populates with notes based on criteria you’ve already established—no need to re-apply all the same filters.
Plays nice with GTD
If you already use Evernote in conjunction with a popular productivity system like Getting Things Done, filtered notes widgets can help make your life even easier by taking advantage of the work you’ve already done.
Add your existing GTD notebooks and saved searches to create a filtered notes widget for each step in your process, including Inbox, Now, Next, Someday, Reference, Brainstorming, and any other stages you’ve incorporated into your routine.
So now, instead of executing different saved searches or opening various notebooks from the navigation bar, you can just go to your Home dashboard and your custom GTD process is there waiting for you, complete with note cards that give you key information without you having to click or scroll. It’s all just there, right alongside your tasks, scratch pad, calendar, and any other widgets that help you—well—get things done.
Power tip: Need to add a lot of information from your email account to your GTD inbox? If you have an “Inbox” notebook in Evernote, forward the emails you need into that notebook. Then set up your GTD inbox widget to filter for notes in that notebook, and the emails you need will magically show up in your widget.
Helping you navigate your day
With the examples above, we’ve illustrated a number of ways you can take advantage of one or more filtered notes widgets to help you navigate your day and achieve your goals. But what we’re most excited about are all the places you’ll take filtered notes widgets based on your own needs and your own process.
More and more, we’re refining Home to make it a place that adapts to you, rather than asking you to adapt to it. Filtered notes widgets are a big step in that direction—giving you new ways to be more productive without interrupting your unique ways of thinking, acting, and accomplishing.
Subscribers to the Evernote Personal plan can add a single filtered notes widget to their Home dashboard. Upgrading to Professional (or being a Teams customer) enables multiple filtered notes widgets, opening up the potential to get an end-to-end view of your workflow and to manage your most important projects simultaneously.
Make sure you’re on the latest version of Evernote to get access to filtered notes widgets. Give them a try, and let us know what you think in the Evernote Forum.
