A Simple Workflow Question From a New Joplin User

Development
1

Hi everyone,

I've recently started moving more of my notes into Joplin, and so far I'm really liking how clean and distraction-free it feels.Before I get too far into organizing everything, I wanted to ask those of you who have been using it for a while.

If you were starting over with an empty notebook today, would you organize your notes mostly with notebooks, tags, or a mix of both? I'm trying to build a system that will still make sense months from now instead of having to reorganize everything later.

I'd love to hear what has worked well for you and anything you wish you had done differently when you first started using Joplin.Thanks in advance, Iā€™m looking forward to learning from the community!

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With Joplin, I would start simple and expand. No need to have the "perfect" structure. You can always rename or bulk change notes later. Your Joplin notes are likely to grow and change as time goes on.

I use a combination of notebooks and tags. Notebooks are great for keeping like a filing cabinet but it can be too rigid at times. This is where the tags come in to save the day. I tend to look at notebooks as active "drawers" that I will want to be able to physically look in and find what I want quickly. Usually related to a current task or project. Tags are for the wider more open support.

As your notes grow, you will want to become more familiar with searching since that is where you will be able to find those obscure notes that you remember from years ago but you don't know what you called it exactly. See Search.

Notebooks

I usually keep notebooks like different filing cabinets.

You have smaller "drawers" where you keep the things that you want to access quickly/often. This could be current projects or just reference material that you want to be able to open a notebook and not have an endless list of notes to scroll through every time.

You have your bigger "drawers" that you may organize with sub-notebooks but they may have 100s or 1000s of notes within them. Simply searching by a note title would be inefficient and that is when tags come in to help.

Tags

For tags, I try to keep tags structures so that they follow a pattern. This allows me to "zoom in" with tags while also keeping them in a predictable order when viewing them/searching for them.

  • project
  • project.2025
  • project.2025.example1
  • project.2026
  • project.2026.example2

I could then assign an example1 related note the following project, project.2025, and project.2025.example1.

Plugins

Templates

I'd recommend keeping it simple to start but an extremely useful one is the Templates plugin.

I prefer to configure the plugin to look inside the "Templates" notebook (I still tag them with template just because it's the alternative way for them to be registered).

I have a very basic Ephemeral note that I can then use for creating a temporary notes that may get deleted or sorted later. With the Templates plugin, you can specify the destination notebook of the note.

I also have many other templates for specific projects. It's useful to be able to call up a template and have the structure of a note ready to go quickly. It's useful for scheduled meetings or an impromptu thought and you want something that is already structured quickly to get it down.

Template Example

You can name the actual note whatever you want. I just name it "Ephemeral" to keep it short and simple. When you create a new note from template, you can select the desired template, in this case "Ephemeral", and it will create the new note with the specified template_title and with a tag of ephemeral and place it in the designated notebook.

---
template_title: {{#custom_datetime}}YYYYMMDDHHMMss{{/custom_datetime}} - Ephemeral
template_notebook: 660f5ffd27964d438e21c138dd28fac5
template_tags: ephemeral
---

The above will create a new note in my "Ephemeral" notebook with the name "20260711063012 - Ephemeral". You can customize the note even more to basically ask you questions and then change the structure of the note based on those answers but that's getting slightly more advanced.

To get the template_notebook you can right-click (or Mac equivalent) on the destination notebook and "Copy notebook ID". Then paste that for the template_notebook value.

Screenshot From 2026-07-11 06-12-44
Screenshot From 2026-07-11 06-12-44258Ɨ328 8.07 KB

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Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply! This is really helpful. I like the idea of starting simple instead of trying to build the perfect system from day one. Using notebooks for the main structure and tags for extra organization sounds like a workflow that will grow well over time.

The template example is especially interesting. I hadn't thought about using templates for quick notes, but I can see how that would save time and keep everything consistent. I'll stick with the basics for now, then start exploring plugins like Templates once I'm more comfortable with Joplin. Really appreciate all the tips, this gives me a much better idea of how to get started.

4

Disclaimer: I'm not a Joplin old-timer, actually I'm now moving from Evernote (after 15 years of usage) to Joplin, but since they both have many similarities re notebooks and tags, my ideas below may be still useful.

Please note, that the same note cannot belong to multiple notebooks at the same time. So with ambiguous notebook selection you can end up with situation when a note can belong to multiple notebooks and you then will spend your time and brain power deciding where to put it.

As an example of how simple it can be, I have only three notebooks (except Trash): Input, Main and Archive. Input is the default notebook to add new notes. If I need to add something quickly, which needs to be sorted later, I add it to the Input notebook. Then periodically, when I have time, I look through the notes in the Input notebook and either delete them (if they not needed anymore) or edit them, if needed, add the appropriate tags, and then move to the Main notebook. And Archive notebook is for notes which are not relevant anymore, but still may be useful from historical point of view.

And for more detailed notes organization I use tags. Tags have this property that one note can have multiple tags and you're not forced to select only one. For grouping I use prefixes: p- for person (e.g. p-bob, p-mom), g- for geography/place (e.g. g-italy), to- for active projects (e.g. to-setup-hosting), done- for completed projects (after completion I change the prefix of the corresponding tag, so to-setup-hosting becomes done-setup-hosting), canceled- for canceled projects, t- for generic topic (e.g. t-ai, t-guitar). I'm also using a- prefix for the type of note (a-book-summary, a-guide), but those are still to be cleaned up and I'm not 100% sure they are really useful for me.

HTH