#Evernote Tip — Clean Up and Streamline Shortcuts with Evernote!

Clean Up the Desktop And Get More Organized!

Don Tomoff

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Published in

The Startup

4 min readJan 18, 2018

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**Shortcut Link Displayed in Evernote Note**

Problem to Be Solved?

Many of us create shortcuts to make getting at our files / the internet / folders, etc. faster and easier.

Where do we put these shortcuts?

Here is what I frequently encounter out in the workplace:

On the desktop (eventually you run out of space and they are hard to find)
In a Folder on the desktop (unlimited quantity, hard to search and find…)
In sub-folders littered across the computer or network drive (this really doesn’t work very well!)

A much easier, and organized option is to use Evernote.

The Process

Create (or locate) the shortcut file you want to save.

**Locate the Shortcut File to Put into Evernote**

Open Evernote Desktop (I use Windows) and start a new Note (Ctrl + N)

**Drag Shortcut File into a New Evernote Note**

I recommend creating a SEPARATE notebook in Evernote (I use “Shortcuts”) to keep these notes in.

Next, continue this process. Create however many shortcut Notes you want and place them in the SHORTCUTS Notebook

**A List of Shortcut notes in a Notebook**

This notebook will continue to have notes added to it as you create Shortcuts going forward.

Create Evernote Shortcuts (different from “shortcut” notes) and add them to your Evernote Shortcuts Toolbar. This will give you instant accessibility to these notes — which is key!

Add Tags to the notes — such as “Excel”, “Folder”, “PDF”, etc.

As your note list grows (imagine 50 or 60), you will want to filter on sub-sets of this list. This is where Tags are very useful.

Done!

Here’s How It Works

Let’s say I want to view a list of my most recently created / accessed MS Excel files…

Select the Note containing that shortcut (or double-click to open the note in a separate window).

**Select the Evernote Note with Shortcut you want**

Double-click the shortcut file contained in the Evernote note.

**Double-click the Shortcut file to invoice shortcut**

X1 Search (my search tool) opens up with Excel files listed, in descending date order (and indicates that I have over 17,000 Excel files).

From here, I can easily refine my search, based on components of file name or some text contained in the file I am looking for.

**X1 Search Listing Excel Files in Date Descending Order**

As you get comfortable with this process, you will never view shortcuts the same way. You’ll be organized and quickly able to access anything you need!