I received a question from someone about how I use my #work-project tag.

I work for a software consulting company. We deliver website, desktop, and mobile business applications to our clients.

I tagged notes for these projects with #work-project and the name of the client. If Microsoft was desperate enough to hire us, I would tag their notes with #work-project and Microsoft.

#work-project is different from the tag #work-internal, which are for internal company projects. I would use #work-internal for scheduling interviews, for instance.

Logical Nested Tags

The hashed tags also serve a different purpose. Evernote supports nested tags, but you can’t have any duplicate tag names across all your tags. Microsoft couldn’t be a sub-tag of two different tags.

I got around this by setting up top- and low-tiered tags. The hashed tags are the top-tiered tags, and normal tags are the low-tiered ones (#work-project top, Microsoft low). I could then use the low tiered tags across all the top-tiered ones, enabling me to nest a single tag under multiple others.

You can see some of the hashed tags I’ve used in my original post.

Separating Work From Personal

Since starting with Evernote, though, I’ve stopped using the hashed tags. I now just have a special ~work tag.

I’ve always separated my work life from my personal life in my head, and even have different calendars for each. It felt appropriate to mirror that in Evernote. I also wasn’t getting much value from all the different top-tiered tags, anyway.

Now I just use ~work as my only top-tiered, binary tag. I separate my work and non-work actions, for instance, with the following searches:

• tag:”~Work” tag:”*Action”
• -tag:”~Work” tag:”*Action”

All the other tags are now flat.

The hashed tags weren’t quite right for me, but they might work for you. Or you might need to adjust them. Model your system after your needs.