Our friend Enrico Nahler, ECC and Filterize user from the very beginning has built an awesome graphic dashboard in Evernote using Filterize. He uses Evernote for many different purposes, has thousands of notes and needed a way to access different kinds of notes as quickly as possible. He also wanted it to be graphically appealing. He created an awesome dashboard and showed his result in this video:

We also love the way Enrico uses Evernote and Filterize together to create such a feel-good dashboard. (The featured image above shows part of it.) So we are now going to give you step-by-step instructions for building such a dashboard for yourself.

How does Enricos dashboard work?

Enrico has built a dashboard for his most important note categories. Therefore, he has one central note that links to other note category, like design or creativity. Every category note has a self-refreshing table of contents powered by Filterize. A Filterize ToC is a self-refreshing list of all note links that belong to one category. They help Enrico to see all notes that belong to one category at a glance.

Enrico structures his Evernote with tags. This makes it easy to create a dashboard, because every note that belongs to one of his categories is tagged with a specific tag, e.g. all design notes have the tag: DESIGN. The whole workflow is based on them.

Where to start

Think about which categories you want for your dashboard, for example: Ideas, Books, Creativity, Tasks or Design. Take Post-Its and write them down or draw a pretty icon.

What do you have to do in Evernote?

1. Scan each Post-It with Evernote. The title of each note has to be the tag you use to assign the category, e.g. DESIGN.
2. Next, you create another new note. It will be the graphic dashboard that links to each Post-It note. Its content is static and you always have to adjust it manually.
3. Insert a table. Enrico’s table has 3×5 cells, but it is completely up to you. In each cell we need now a picture of a Post-It.
4. Therefore Enrico copied each of the Post-It pictures to a picture processing tool of his choice. There he scaled all the pictures to 300×300 pixels and saved them.
5. Now you can insert the pictures via drag&drop into the table.
6. To realize the navigation between each Post-It note and the dashboard, you now need to link them, e.g. the picture of the “ideas” category needs a link to the ideas Post-It-note. So you can reach them with a single click.
   Visit a Post-It note and copy the note link. Go back to the dashboard, right-click on the picture and add the link. Repeat for each of the pictures.
   You can also make back-links from those Post-It notes to the main dashboard note by linking each Post-It scan with the dashboard note.

PLEASE note: For some time now, Evernote doesn’t support picture linking on mobile devices. So that kind of navigation won’t work. We have two workarounds for you:

1. You can insert the note link beneath the picture as text. This text link will work.
2. Use emojis instead of pictures. They are basically text, so you can link them with the Post-It note.

Congratulations – your dashboard is now finished! But now you have carry out a second step, in order to reach the full power of Enrico’s dashboard idea. You need Filterize.

Filterize

Filterize is an online cloud service that acts like your personal Evernote assistant. One thing Filterize can do for you is providing you with a self-refreshing table of contents.

If you are not currently a Filterize user, you need to sign up first. Then you can built the ToC like Enrico did. Here is second video of him in which he explains how to set up such a ToC. But it shows an old interface, so we will explain it here, and we recommend you watch our video about ToC configuration.

But you don’t have to built this whole automation on your own. Enrico has uploaded his workflow to our Filterize Lounge. So you can go there and install Enricos automation directly.

How to create the ToC filter

If you want to configure it by yourself you have to do the following steps.

1. Log in to Filterize.
2. Go to ToC manager and click create new ToC.
3. First you have to enter an Evernote search query. This defines which notes will be included in the table of contents. You can enter any valid Evernote search here. In our case, you have to enter: tag:”[TITLE]”. This way Filterize finds all notes with the tag that equals the notes title. That is why the note title needs to be the tag name.
4. Now you can make a lot of settings, e.g. the note list style. If you need some help, please watch the ToC configuration video.
5. At the last step of the ToC configuration, you need to determine a search tag. Please enter here: [DASH-TITLE]. This is a marker that you have to insert somewhere within a Evernote note. It will later be replaced by your ToC.

One last thing remains to do

Go back to Evernote and insert at each Post-It note beneath the Post-It scan the search tag [DASH-TITLE]. During the next Evernote sync, it will be replaced by the self-refreshing Filterize ToC, that contains all the notes that belong to this category.

Try it for yourself and we hope it will be as useful for you as it was for Enrico!

Links

• Watch Enrico Nahler’s video about his awesome dashboard at Youtube.
• Watch Enrico Nahler’s video about how to create the automation at Youtube.
• Install Enrico Nahler’s automation at the Filterize Lounge.
• Learn more about how to scan your Post-Its with Evernote.
• Learn more about how a dashboard helps you to focus in Evernote.

Filterize is a cloud service that acts as your personal Evernote assistant. Tell the software how you organize your notes or just let its Artificial Intelligence learn how to do it automatically. Filterize will then manage your notes in the background, eliminating repetitive tasks, avoiding errors and saving you time.