Evernote allows you to add tags to all of your notes. You can use tags to assign project information, note types, or mark related persons. Every user can create up to 100,000 tags in their Evernote account, while every note can have up to 100 assigned tags. So there is huge potential to organize your notes.

Common Use-Cases

There are a lot of use-cases for using tags. A common one is project-management. Simply create a tag for every project you have and assign the correct one to all related notes. Since Evernote introduced hierarchical tags, you can also model project categories like home, work, vacation, … or subprojects like renovation or garden as home-projects.

You can imagine a similar structure for your task management, where you assign priorities, contexts, or related persons to each task (saved as a note). Or your recipes for cooking. You can organize them into salads, fish, meat, and desserts.

If you want to use all of this at the same time, just add a parent tag projects,todos, and recipes

The Problem with Hierarchical Tags

The main drawback with hierarchical notes in Evernote is that hierarchies don’t influence the search. So if you search for the projects tag, only notes having this tag will be found.

There are three common ways to handle this:

1. Create a saved search with all project related tags, like any: tag:home tag:renovation tag:garden tag:work tag:vacation.
   Problem: You have to change it every time you create a new tag.
2. Use a specific prefix for all hierarchical tags, like pr-home, pr-home-garden, pr-home-renovation, pr-work, and pr-vacation. Now you can find all your projects with the search tag:pr-* and all your home-projects with tag:pr-home-*.
   Problem: You have annoying long tags, and when you search for your notes related to the garden, you have to search for tag:pr-home-garden
3. Add all tags in the hierarchy. For example, tag your garden notes withproject, home, and garden.
   Problem: If you forget a parent tag, your search is broken.

Automatic Tag Hierarchy

If you assign a tag, filterize can add all parent tags automatically. So you have the solution, as described in the third case, but without the requirement of adding all parent tags by hand.

Additionally, you can select which parent tags you are interested in. So if you have irrelevant tags in your hierarchy, you can avoid adding them.