I fielded this question in Quora recently: What are the 8 must-have notebooks in Evernote?

This was my quick answer. You may want to check back online to see if anyone else had some better ideas. I'm posting the piece here too because 1) I wrote it; 2) I can and 3) I can update it easily if I find the latest incarnation of Evernote's magnificent application offers any new insights.

There aren't 8 "must have" notebooks that I'm aware of - the structure of your database can be literally anything, depending on whether you're indexing a beer-mat collection or running a company.

Required

You're only required (by Evernote) to have two Admin notebooks -

  • The Default - this can be any notebook name, but one notebook must be assigned to the 'default' status. This is where your clips and notes go if Evernote doesn't have any specific instructions what else to do with them. Most folks seem to call this an Inbox note and go through it regularly to assign notes elsewhere.

  • The Trash - where notes go when they die; you can (and IMHO should) empty the trash regularly. I do know some folks who leave the trash files where they are "in case" they were wrong to delete some information. A big trash notebook though can slow your system down and bloat the database size.

You may get

  • A 'Shared with Me' section in your account if anyone shares notebooks with you, or if you import a shared notebook from a website. Copy the notes from that notebook into your own account if you wish.
  • A 'Conflicting Changes' notebook if one or more note(s) sync with the database and Evernote is unable to decide which should take precedence. Both notes are saved - it's up to the user to decide how to deal with the conflict.
  • An 'imported notes' notebook if you import notes from an ENEX backup copy of a notebook. This is to avoid conflicts with any copies of the same notes which might exist in your database.

I'd strongly recommend you add a

  • Shared With Others notebook (or Stack) to hold any notes or notebooks that you have provided to others. It means you can find those notes easily if someone asks for explanations or changes, and it avoids the possibility that anyone edits or deletes those notes while they're still being used by someone else.

  • Projects stack + individual notebooks for any projects you may have ongoing: from launching the new website to painting a bedroom

  • Contacts stack - to allocate a notebook to every company and individual that you deal with so that if you want to wonder what Wanda said in her last report, you simply have to go to that notebook to find it. That kinda breaks the 'open plan' setup of Evernote, but I find it really easy to administer - and if you have thousands of notes, this division into projects and people means that at worst you only have to look through a few tens or hundreds of notes to find a match, rather than the full database. And it's a lot quicker.

(Sadly my largest notebook is for Amazon - given the number of household purchases we make!)

Keep links to your notes, notebooks and stacks in the Shortcuts/ Favorites section of your app (where you can) for more rapid access.

YMMV

Obviously your mileage will vary - it depends on whether you're using the notes for study, research or writing a book. But don't worry - create all the notebooks you want. You can always tie them back into a better scheme of things later. The most important thing now is (usually) 'make sure you can find the things you're filing away again quickly' - it's always possible to tidy them up later.

I've gone from having most of my notes (around 52,000) in one notebook and surviving on tags and searches (but losing things occasionally) to having the same number of notes in about 270 notebooks.

It's taken me 10+ years to get to this state, but I'm (finally) feeling as though I know exactly where every nugget of information should go so that it can be found again quickly... well, it's worked so far anyway!