Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Keep your tags and properties organized by categorizing them
Ever feel too organized? (We know, there’s not really any such thing!) Sometimes you are organizing your tasks or returning to an old project and you notice you have multiple tags for your tasks. Oops!
This week’s tip, shared by enkanadi, suggests grouping those to prevent any crossover. Keeping everything categorized can help when reviewing your tasks as well, to find everything all at once.
I had plenty of tags added over the years, and at some point it was hard for me to remember what I’ve already added (maybe with slightly different name) and filter through a whole list while adding new tasks. I also noticed I was reusing some tags by mistake for different purposes - because of vague naming I forgot over time what the purpose of them was. Filtering by them was not useful because of that.
To fix this problem, I’ve organized my tags - I’ve created categories for them, which are added to names - before the actual name with underscore (#category_tag).
Example: I have a list of books I want to read. I use tags to keep track of where I’ve heard about it. Previously those tags were looking like this: thisPerson, thatPodcast, blogA, etc. I’ve changed that to: books_thisPerson, books_thatPodcast, book_blogA.
This way when I add new book idea with Smart Add, I just start typing #book and see a list of possible options, and don’t have to go through a whole list of tags.
I also have some lists that I share with other RTM users. For tags on that list I use another category - for example AB_tag (for list with users A and B). This way I don’t mix those tags with my own.
I’ve added a similar system for my locations. The biggest group of locations consists of different places where I can buy things - like pharmacy (shop_pharmacy), grocery (shop_grocery) or pet shop (shop_pet). I have also added more specific locations, for when I know I can buy something only at this place (shop_thisOneShop) or even online shops (shop_websiteName). I don’t bother with actual GPS location - if there are several shops with the same brand near me, I treat them as one.
This helps a lot when adding tasks, and also when I look for something - tags and locations are sorted alphabetically in the list, so with this system are displayed categorised (all tags starting with “books_” are in one place). I can also easily spot tags/locations that I don’t use anymore and delete them.
Thanks for sharing this tip, enkanadi! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
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