According to their research, it’s easier to find files using labels rather than folders. However, there’s also a case to be made for a folder and tag system.įour researchers from the University of Washington studied the comparative benefits folders and tags. If you’re producing a relatively small amount of work, using tags might not be productive. It can be time-consuming to tag every file-especially if you can’t remember those tags when you need them. Folders, on the other hand, let us 'place' our notes in a single physical location.įorte definitely has a point. 'Tags force us to think about our notes in a completely abstract way,' he argues. That’s why you have to concentrate on memorizing a single phone number, but you can immediately recall where you left hundreds of items in your home.

Plus, Forte says, it’s much easier to remember things with physical locations. Tiago Forte, founder of productivity training firm Forte Labs, explains, 'When you rely heavily on tags, you have to perfectly recall every single tag you’ve ever used, and exactly how it is spelled and punctuated.' Use folders as broad buckets to classify your files then, use tags to make them highly findable. Ultimately, the researchers concluded the best system involves folders *and* tags.

This list helps jog my memory if I ever forget a tag plus, I can periodically look it over to find and delete tags I didn’t end up needing. I use an Evernote note to keep track of all my tags. Once you’ve come up with 10-plus tags, it’s a good idea to create a master list. If you find yourself going over that limit, it may make more sense to create two separate tags-for example, rather than tagging something as 'Q1 expense report,' you could tag it as 'Q1' and 'expense report.' For instance, will you use singular or plural terms ('report' versus 'reports'?) Which word type will you use: nouns, adjectives, verbs, or a combination of the three? Are you going to capitalize tags or leave them lowercase? Will you incorporate symbols and characters? The more standardized your system is, the easier it’ll be to find files.Īs a rule of thumb, keep your tags to two words or less. Being able to sort my inbox into these categories helps me stay on top of things. I tag (or label) my emails as 'Answer,' 'Done,' 'Pending,' and 'Ignore,' for example. If you're building a system for documents, you could add tags for 'reports,' 'blog posts,' 'letters,' and so forth.Īlso consider making tags for the status of your files. If you’re making a tag system for your spreadsheets, your high-level tags might be 'budget,' 'schedule,' 'estimate,' 'invoice,' and 'Gantt charts.' Examples:Ī bookstore creates separate spaces for books depending on their genre: mystery, romance, historical fiction, and so on. These types of tags divide your content into the most general categories possible, which usually means by type. Your first step: Figure out your high-level tags. Luckily, you can avoid these issues by establishing a system. It’s easy to spend fifteen extra minutes adding a ton of tags every time you save a new file-and it’s also easy to create so many different tags that you completely forget which ones you’ve used. Of course, the flexibility and unlimited nature of tags can be dangerous. They're perhaps your most flexible tool for organizing your files. Tags are the simplest way to add data to files without dealing with endless layers of folders. You could tag the document with both the project’s name and the client’s name, then save the file just in the project's folder. Tags, on the other hand, are perfect for adding category data like this, since you can add as many tags as you want to a file. With folders, you'd have to pick one folder or duplicate the file, which could cause issues. Say you've made a project brief for a client and you want to save it in the specific project folder and to the client’s main folder. Think of them like characteristics for a person: Just like you’d describe someone as 'tall,' 'funny,' 'brunette,' and so on, you’d tag a file 'important,' 'tax info,' 'just for fun,' or 'work.'īut why use tags, when you could just use folders?Ī file can only be in one folder at a time-but it could have an unlimited number of tags. Tags are perhaps the most flexible tools for organizing your files

Still has the tagger