Evernote is a powerful tool for writing notes, collecting information and referencing materials but with so much functionality available it can be daunting to figure out your own personal workflow for such a tool. Thomas Honeyman provides a simple but in-depth method for using Evernote, maybe it will work for you.

I believe that the best insights are made possible when they’re built from the best knowledge available. Discovering that information gets easier and easier every single day. Medium has become my go-to resource for war stories from the startup community. Twitter, of course, is my source of quality real-time news. Quora is my first move when I need a complex question answered.

But I’ve always struggled to hold on to that knowledge once I’ve found it. My brain stores thoughts about as well as my hands hold water, and it took me years to finally find a tool which was up to the task. That tool, of course, is Evernote.

It was hardly love at first sight. I had Evernote installed for two years without ever saving a single note. In January of this year, I saved my first note in a desperate attempt to begin getting my parking tickets in order (I live in Los Angeles). I spent the next few months with just a couple of tickets and to-do lists saved in Evernote, wondering why people loved it so much. But it finally clicked, and I promptly avalanched hundreds of notes into the app. It’s now one of the most indispensable tools I have. What changed?

Essentially, I learned the right way to use Evernote. Here’s what I learned:

The key: Tags, not notebooks.

When I first started using Evernote, I used it the way I’ve always used physical notebooks: a note goes in a notebook.

Of course!

So I created a bunch of notebooks. One notebook for a school class. One notebook for my parking tickets. One notebook for reminiscing about coffee. Unfortunately, this is a fine way to miss out on perhaps the most powerful way to use Evernote: the tagging system. I discovered this system through a wonderful Michael Hyatt post. He noticed that tags are essentially the same thing as notebooks, except with a lot more power (and a lot less visual reinforcement). Here’s how to use them.

Note: You can only create tag hierarchies on the desktop Evernote client. On iOS or web, you won’t be able to make hierarchies, but using tags in your notes will work just the same. It’s not as pretty visually, but it’s just as powerful.

Step 1. Create Notebooks

Before you get deep into tags, you’ll still have to have some kind of notebook to save your notes in. But instead of a complex notebook system, you can keep it extremely simple! I organize my hundreds of notes into just five notebooks: