Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Use descriptions to keep track of your tags
It’s easy to go all-in on tags and have a tag for everything you need to stay organized and, well, on task. To keep perspective on what’s what, olliebaum suggests descriptions to keep your tags organized. Not only can you have a task ready for describing your tags, but you can organize those descriptions for easy reference. Consider it a gift to Future You! :)
So you’ve been reading the Tips & Tricks forum and found lots of brilliant ideas for how to use tags in Remember The Milk and you start tagging away to your heart’s content.
But a few months pass by and you can’t remember exactly what #think.fast or #gold.star means. And then you find yourself wasting time trying to remember or (in my case) batch removing tags. Well no more!
I solve this problem using a ‘description’ tag. For all current tags in use and any new tag I add, I create a new task with the new tag and #description. In the task name I write a description of how to use that tag for future reference.
Then when the moment comes and you’re wondering “What on Earth does #hypno.toad mean?”, then you simply need to search 'tag:hypno.toad AND tag:description’ and hey presto you’ll see a task with a description of the #hypno.toad tag and precisely how to use it.
Or simpler yet, make your 'tag description’ priority 1 and then it will show right up the top of the results when you click on the tag.
I also make tag:description into a Smart List and use a custom list sorting which groups it by tags. This gives me a nice clear title above each tag description to make it super easy to scroll through and find the necessary tag.
It’s a great way to keep using tags you’d forgotten about. Or even for fine-tuning your use of tags you use all the time. I’ll use my tag description to explicitly outline when to use a tag and when to use an alternative tag.
I also added a description for the description tag itself. This is simply a task with only #description as a tag. Mine looks like this:
“For any new tag, add a priority 1 task as a description so you remember how to use the tag, and tag with 'description’ #description”
That way if you forget what #description does, you’re still covered! 😅
Thanks for sharing this tip, olliebaum! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.
