Evernote has two different ways to organise notes.
Notebooks
The first is traditional because it mirrors physical note taking. Stacks contain Notebooks full pages of Notes. However their relationship is a linear one to one relationship. A Notebook can only ever be in one stack of notebooks and a page of Notes can only ever be in one Notebook. This organisation method is familiar but there is a better way.
Tags
To explain tags I am going to use a real life metaphor: Imagine you had unlimited tags and strings, each tag is labelled with a context adding additional metadata to help with organising the note. Then using the strings attach the tags to all the notes it relates to. Once attached each tag can be pulled to collect all the notes related to that tag regardless of the notebook it was stored in. Using tags you can assign multiple contexts to a single notes, enabling many alternative ways to collect the notes. But it doesn't stop there: by combining these tags together you can create saved searches.
By using tags I have managed to consolidate the number of notebooks I need. I have only 11 notebooks and I have plans to use tags to reduce it further. If you are going to use tags don't get over excited when assigning: My top tip is to never add a tag unless you are going to pull the string to collect them by it.
Could you use tags to go paperless? How to use Evernote to get clutterless and paperless
