Organisation
Tags for the things categories cannot hold
Some things do not belong in one place. Chasing an invoice is work, but it is also money, and it is also that one client. A category makes you choose. Reminder tags let a reminder be in several sets at once without being duplicated.
Categories are where something lives. Tags are what it is about.
A category answers a question about the part of your life a reminder belongs to: work, home, personal. Every reminder gets exactly one, and the seven built-in ones cover most of a week.
Tags answer a different question, and a reminder can have several. They are free text, typed as you create the reminder: a client's name, a project code, a month, the van, your mother, the word bills.
The distinction matters because the two are used at different moments. You filter by category when you change context — arriving at work, sitting down at home. You filter by tag when you are about to do a specific thing and want everything connected to it in one view: everything tagged for this client before the call, everything tagged bills on payday.
One slice across the whole list
Filtering by tag pulls a reminder out of Work, one out of Personal and one out of Home, and shows them together. That is not something a category structure can do, however carefully you build it.
It is most obviously useful for anything that involves one other party. A tag for a client, a tenant, a contractor or a relative collects the phone calls, the paperwork, the appointment and the thing you promised to send, regardless of where each one was filed.
Tags are also disposable in a way categories are not. A tag for a two-month project is a reasonable thing to create and then stop using. A category for it would sit in your list forever.
- Several tags on a single reminder
- Free text, so the vocabulary is yours rather than the app's
- Filter to a tag to see one slice of everything at once
- Cheap to create and safe to abandon
Tags that tend to earn their keep
The useful ones describe something the reminder is attached to in the real world, rather than describing how you feel about it.
A person or a client
Everything connected to one person in one view, so the call, the document and the follow-up arrive together instead of separately.
A project or a job number
A tag for the kitchen, the house move, the certification, the audit. It ends when the project does, without leaving a permanent structure behind.
A moment rather than a date
Tags like payday, month-end or weekend collect the things that happen at a recurring moment you cannot express as a single time.
A place or a vehicle
Everything tagged for the van, the office, the allotment or the second site, ready to read before you get there.
A kind of effort
A tag for the five-minute jobs makes a genuinely useful list: the set of things you can clear in the gap before a meeting.
Paired with a priority
Tags say what something is about; priority says how much it matters. Filter to a tag and sort by priority and you have an agenda.
Keeping a tag list usable
Tags rot faster than categories do, because they are so easy to make. Four habits keep them worth filtering by.
Pick one form of each word and hold it
Singular or plural, full name or initials — decide once. A list with bill, bills and billing in it is three sets pretending to be one.
Do not tag what the category already says
A tag called work on a reminder in the Work category adds nothing and makes every filter noisier.
Let project tags die
When the job is finished, stop using its tag. Old tags on completed reminders are a record, not a maintenance burden.
Two or three tags is plenty
If a reminder needs five, the reminder is probably two reminders, and splitting it will help more than labelling it will.
You can type the tag into the reminder itself
Timelee's quick-add line parses shortcuts as you write. Type the reminder, then add "!high" for priority, "#bills" for a tag and "@work" for a category, all on the same line, and Timelee pulls them out and applies them. It removes the main reason people never tag anything, which is that tagging is a second step after the thing is already captured.
A reminder rarely belongs to one part of your life. Your organisation should not pretend otherwise.
One category for where it lives, as many tags as it needs for what it is about.
Tag the next three reminders as you type them
Use the quick-add line and add a tag on the same line as the task. Then filter by it once and see whether the slice is useful.
Keep reading
- Reminder categoriesOne per reminder, for the part of life it belongs to.
- Reminder prioritiesLow to Urgent, and what to do with each.
- Tasks and to-do listsThe list you are slicing.
- Reminder historyWhat you finished, still carrying its tags.
- Reminders for freelancersWhere a tag per client does the most work.