bachandjazz
I get the sentiment of wanting to minimize the tags you use but when you concatenate tags together like that you end up creating more tags than you need in the long run.
Nested tags in apps like Bear are the same trap folders. It creates silos that result in making things harder to find just like folders do.
It’s a good idea to limit the tags you use in a document but that doesn’t mean you should limit the total number of tags you use across your PKM.
Tags are primarily used to find or group notes. When first adding tags, think about how it’s going to help you find this later.
When it comes to adding tags to support Smart Folders and Search, I don’t add them unless:
- I already have a Smart Folder that would capture that note. If I don’t, then I clearly haven’t needed that tag before for anything meaningful. Adding it now would just be an exercise of “making myself feel like I’m doing something responsible” but in reality, does nothing to help future me.
- I found myself searching for something using some terms and couldn’t find it at first. When I do find it, I’m either going to add tags for those tags or (more often) going to find a Hub it makes sense to add a >> to that note for.
In general, you’re going to have a relatively manageable set of Object, Area, and Status tags.
Detail type tags are where things tend to get extensive, but that’s fine. They’ll remain management if you don’t add them “preemptively” but wait until you discover it would’ve been useful.
With projectDocs and projectSupport, ask yourself what type of tag they fall into?
If it were me, I would simply use #project because they’re both #project notes. If I needed more detail because I thought it would help me find it in the future, then I might include #support as a Detail type tag in the note.
Why?
Because #support can mean different things in different contexts. And that’s okay. That’s how language works. We string words together to communicate ideas and meaning.
The same applies to tags. Instead of combining them or conjoining time, string them together when you search.
e.g., when you go to look for that support note one day you’ll say, “I’m trying to find that one note with xyz in it from that one project.”
So you start by typing in #project, then you scan and think, “Well, what kind of project note was it? It was about x, so that’s probably a support note.”
So you add #support to your search after #project, and that narrows it down further.
Then you might think, well I know that project is done, so you add #done, and things narrow down even more.
But because you used the conjunction of tags to search, you can still use the #support tag if you ever need to add it to a #meeting note, a #person note, etc.
And to reiterate, as others have mentioned, I find it far more useful to have a single note for a project with a tag #project with >> links to related notes AND those related notes would NOT have tags because every note doesn’t need a tag. If I want to find those related notes it’s easy to find the #project note and then just click on the >> link to get to it.