I use an @inbox to drop new content into Evernote, but then process it on a daily basis into other notebooks.
When I first started using Evernote, I didn’t really think too hard about how I was going to use notebooks. Was I going to have a single notebook? Multiple? Work notebooks and personal notebooks? I didn’t know. I had no idea and didn’t even give it a second thought.
Then before I knew it, I started looking at my notebook list with some major guilt. There was no system at all and my left-brain hated it. My default notebook, which at the time was simply called “kenclark’s notebook,” was a grab bag for everything. That might have been an appropriate strategy if it was the only notebook (because I could then just treat it as an archive and rely on tags and searching to find items), but of course I had a couple of other random notebooks so there was no real strategy there.
Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t even thought of Evernote from the perspective of GTD. While the beauty and strength of Evernote is that you can clip, capture and send all sorts of items to it from any number of platforms, the content builds up very fast and to use a GTD term is “unprocessed”.
My “a-ha” was that the default notebook was really just another inbox that had to be processed as opposed to a one-size-fits-all archive of my stuff. I know it sounds ridiculous, but once I changed the name of my default notebook to “@inbox”, I began to process it daily and move content into other notebooks using basic GTD concepts. I tell you it was a minor thing, but it worked great and I have never looked back.
If you’re a GTD’r or are looking for a notebook methodology, give it a try.