Tips to Organize Your Life in One Evernote Account

Do you have two Evernote accounts because you want to keep work and your personal life separate?

It sounds logical but consider this scenario. An Evernote-loving friend told me about how she needed to make a doctor’s appointment on Friday, so she smartly set up an Evernote task to call the office at 9:30 am — right when they open. There’s just one problem — the task lives in her personal account, and on this busy Friday, she was up early — working away at 8:00 am — using her business account to crank away and get things done.

It wasn’t until 4:00 pm when she was ready to wind down that she flipped to her personal Evernote account where she saw the missed task. Worse, the doctor’s office closed at 3:00 pm, so now she had to wait until Monday.

See the problem with managing two Evernote accounts?

Students ask me how to manage work and the rest of their lives in Evernote. It’s no longer about work-life balance. While this is important, the way we work today is better described as work-life integration. There’s no longer a separation between business and personal hours — they all harmonize. You book your vacation flights while working, and your next marketing idea pops into your brain while making dinner.

We still need to keep some separation, so how do we do that in Evernote?

Here are my top three expert tips for managing your entire life — including business — in Evernote.

Tip 1: Start by keeping one Evernote account.

Unless you work for a corporation that provides you an Evernote Teams account exclusively for your work with them, I advise collecting all the data of your life — both business and personal — in one account. Evernote even structures its pricing tiers to support this, offering a Professional service tier that caters to those (like me) who embrace work-life integration and benefit from commingling everything in one account.

The benefit of co-mingling your data is far superior to keeping two Evernote accounts.

At the paid Evernote level, you can easily flip between multiple accounts, but this is an unnecessary step and negates the benefits of search, which is the key reason Evernote is such a robust tool. Search doesn’t work across accounts, only the account you’re currently in. Also, tasks won’t be separated between the two accounts. My friend would have been able to see all her tasks — including the one to call the doctor right alongside her business tasks for the day.

If you're concerned about combining everything into one Evernote account, thinking that things you’ve shared with your business world might leave your personal stuff visible, you don't need to worry about this. Everything you keep in your Evernote account is private by default. And permissions can be granted on a note by note, or notebook by notebook basis.

Ready to merge multiple Evernote accounts into one? Starting Fresh with Evernote walks you through it.

Tip 2: Create separation with naming conventions

To easily maintain organization between your personal and work-life inside one Evernote account, use one of the following strategies.

Strategy 1: Notebook Naming Conventions

I precede all my business notebooks with the naming convention “HE: “ (for Harmon Enterprises). This way, they all group together in the notebook list. To understand how Evernote displays your notebooks and how naming conventions impact the view, read this article: Gaming the Naming - The ABCs of Organizing Your Evernote Notebooks.

Strategy 2: Stacks

Stacks are like file cabinets for your notebooks. You can put whatever notebooks in them you want and easily remove or add notebooks at any time. Separate business from personal by:

Creating two stacks — one for personal projects and one for professional projects.
Sorting your notebooks between the two stacks.

Tip 3: Use Evernote Home to bring focus to important projects.

To make the most out of Evernote Home, I recommend upgrading to an Evernote Professional plan. With a Professional plan, all of Evernote is more powerful and useful for tracking everything — both business and personal. It unlocks expanded features plus multiple instances of the widgets, which allows you to use different widget copies to focus on different areas of your life.

You’ll love how Evernote Home creates a dashboard for your life.

Through a series of widgets, you can configure Home to help you capture and focus on exactly what matters to you.

Here’s a quick how-to for using a couple of the widgets to do so — and keep business and personal split along the way.

Scratch Pad Widget

Segregate your personal and professional ideas, to-do’s, and thoughts as you capture them by using two scratch pads. Add two to your Home and make them different colors. Then (power-use alert: most users don’t know they can do this) rename the Scratch Pads. I advise titling one Business Ideas and the other Personal Ideas.

Here’s the difference:

The magic of this recommendation happens when you understand that the widget title becomes the note title upon converting your Scratch Pad ideas to notes.

Check out the contextual difference between notes created with the default scratch pad title and the renamed title when you “Convert to note”:

You see so much more information when the note title represents something descriptive. Learn more about why this smart Note titling tip is so powerful in this article — The Surprisingly Simple Habit that Organizes Your Evernote Account.

Calendar Widget:

Evernote's Home Calendar Widget connects to Google Calendar and displays your events right inside your account.

Evernote confirmed that Outlook integration is actively being developed. While you wait, check out CalendarBridge as a (paid) tool to sync Outlook to Google so you can see your events in the widget.

While this event visibility in Evernote is fantastic, it only scratches the surface of the feature's power.

You can also link notes to your calendar events and meetings so you can access them with a single click. Watch a demo of how I do this in this Evernote in The Wild YouTube episode. It’s really awesome for productivity and something we cover in-depth inside the Academy (members can watch this Masterclass on Evernote Calendar).

You can use calendar layers or connect multiple Google accounts (Professional feature) to see all your life events in one spot.

A simple power-user tip for both Evernote Personal and Professional is to use different colors for your calendar layers — and map them to the same colors you use for your two scratch pads as suggested above.

You can see here how I have my business calendar layer green and my personal calendar layer yellow (same as the ScratchPad) here:

Filtered Notes Widget

At the Evernote Professional level, you gain access to more than one Filtered Notes Widget (Personal plans allow for only one instance of the Filtered Notes Widget).

This powerful widget helps create focus on your projects, and each widget can feature a different project.

For example, as you see below, you can view your trip to Morocco in one Filtered Notes Widget and track lead status with other Filtered Notes Widgets. One shows current leads, with another highlighting open proposals:

The options with Filtered Notes Widget are endless, though — they’re only limited by your understanding of Evernote and your workflow creativity.

As you can see, it’s easy to set your business and personal life up for success in Evernote. Not only does it bring a cost advantage (no need for two Evernote subscriptions!), but centralizing your Evernote data in one account also saves you time and energy — something we all need more of with work-life integration.

I’ve been following these exact strategies in Evernote since I started my business more than a decade ago. Of course, with some updates as the app evolves. Read more about my business story here.

Now that you have a solid grasp on some ways to keep the different areas of your life separated in one Evernote account, next, you’ll develop efficient workflows to effectively manage it all. Whether it’s a workflow for your recipes or tracking your website redesign, discover how to structure them (all in one account) with the growing list of Workflow Workshop trainings inside the Academy.

Academy members can start with one (or more) of these today:

We go into depth on organization, workflows, and Evernote skills inside the Academy — you’ll not only understand Evernote, but you’ll learn how to get creative in your workflows and use Evernote home to support it all.

Not yet a member of the Academy? Join today and start enjoying more work-life integration.