This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art start a conversation about tags. Classifying information in our productive lives comes in many different ways. We discuss what tagging is, how tags are different from other types of organizing, and how to jumpstart your use of tags.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/127 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to continue discussing productivity taxonomy from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Productivity Taxonomy, Part 1

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Productivity Taxonomy, Part 2

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Hypernym / hyponym

Evernote

OneNote

Dewey Decimal System

Zettelkasten

Episode 124, Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten

Bullet Journal

Episode 035, What Is the Bullet Journal? How Does It Work?

Episode 073, Tailoring the Bullet Journal Method

Episode 123, Productivity Labs, Methods Edition—Bullet Journal

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Read More

Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:25I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:26 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:27Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we're going to be diving into a topic that is near and dear to my heart, but I think is also really important for people to recognize as a fundamental component of personal productivity systems that I think is often lost in the world of just organizing your systems for action. And that is tags, the concept of using taxonomy to be able to be more productive. And this was a topic actually brought up by art Gelwicks. And so I'm going to hand it over to you art we were

Art Gelwicks 0:59talking about in one of the previous episodes, we're talking about organizing notes, and specifically recalling content from notes. And that always raises the specter of tagging. So I thought it would be worthwhile. Having talked about this in the past, for us to dedicate some time to this actual topic in and of itself, separate from applications right now separate from systems and implementations. But really what tagging means, what it means within the context of our personal and professional systems, information management for ourselves. And also, as we start to really get into it, how this helps us improve our organization. beyond some of the alternatives, things like folder structures and that sort. There's, you'll hear classically that, you know, tagging is better than folders, use tagging, don't use folders, use tagging, don't use folders. And I don't know if I necessarily agree with that in all cases. And I think that's where we need to start to dig into this, because there are so many variants of tagging so many conceptual pieces, that I think it's hard for people to really get their hands around as a starting place, but also to give it the extended life it needs for it to make a difference. I know a lot of people, including myself, have implemented different methods of tagging numerous times. Well, if you're implementing it numerous times, it means that numerous times it's not working right. So I wanted to see if you guys could help help me frame it up for the listeners as to what we think tagging is truly beyond just the Wikipedia definition. And also how we can start to help people out.

Francis Wade 2:50I think, first of all, we're there's different objects that can be tagged to or benefit. There's digital objects, which you mentioned, there's physical objects and psychological objects, maybe there's others that I haven't thought of. But in any case, the reason we tagged it is to, for me, it's like adding a handle to a suitcase. When you add the handle to the suitcase, you don't have to pick up the whole suitcase in its entirety, you could just use the handle. So it's a way of manipulating the object using a small kind of not substitute but a small attribute of the object. So if you're manipulating manipulating the attribute, then you don't have to manipulate the entire thing. And that makes it very handy or useful for us to get different things done. So a tag is always a bit of a manipulative shortcut. It allows us to manage lots of stuff, but only using some small attributes. So we're looking to get leverage the way you lose a handle on a suitcase. That's my

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:00theory. I agree with that in in, in large part, my thoughts on taxonomy is wide and varied, right. So if we think about taxonomy is just the categorization of a set, then we can go then deeper, when we start to think about it from a personal productivity perspective, which is, as Francis noted, we are applying how we apply metadata in a website. You know, for search engine optimization purposes, we can think about the application of new data on top of the original set of data. So the items in our productivity systems, whether they be projects, actions, events, or otherwise, documents, you name it, the idea is that we're applying data that is not the object itself to the object, so that we're able to better contextualize and also better able to sort or filter those things in our systems and we lose something When we don't do that, I feel like many times people set up systems and they actually lose capabilities, because they don't take advantage of that in the systems. And one of the things I really abhor is when I come across a tool that doesn't give me the capability of doing that kind of tagging. Now, there are some that I have cobbled together and have worked for me. So for example, I've been a Google Calendar user for many years. And I use tagging in that system. But I've cobbled that together, because I've had to use the search feature in order to be able to tag things because it's not, it doesn't have an inherent tagging capability. So there are these pieces in your world, we have to think through, how are you going to use a taxonomy to be best able to help you versus just I could have many different calendars, right, that's one option. And you can think about those as folders in a Dropbox OneDrive Google Drive perspective. But the reality is, is that that is a container tags are applied data, they are a way for you to be able to look at things across many areas of your system, many organized areas of your system. And that's really where tags become more powerful, is when you're capable of understanding that now tags actually serve two purposes. For me, I consider them an applied data or metadata perspective, where I am connecting disparate parts together for purposes of context. But then they also helped me connect other types of things for action. So what is really a reference type system, the other is an action type system. So we can use tags for say, I have all of my recipes, in a notebook in Evernote, that is for the recipes that I have, right, and they're all contained in there. But now I want to slice and dice, the different recipes in there to say, pastry recipes, things that are, you know, baked goods and that kind of thing. So I could have a pastries tag, but I could also then have a lunch and dinner recipes tag. And now I can separate those two apart, right, so there's that function of being able to do that. Plus, I could have a family recipe that is in my family notebook. And I can also tag that pastries. And that tag now gets pulled in when I search for all of the things that are tagged pastries. So now I'm not limited to where I'm putting things because if I can just apply a little bit of data to it, I can now find that data faster. At the same stage, I can have a notebook or folder for projects. And I can then identify a status to each of those resident projects as say, notes or documents. And now I can say, Okay, which of these projects are in status to, and then I can search for those, just by virtue of that singular tag. And that's the kind of power that I think a lot of people don't take advantage of in their systems, and really is, I think fundamental to you being able to be more productive.

Francis Wade 7:59I think it goes to the, to some degree with, with what Ray is talking about the programmers who write software for digital objects, I think there's a, there's a way in which they don't go far enough in anticipating the user's needs. They don't think through all the use cases, or they don't look for the unmet needs that the user is trying to fill. So they don't think as far as Okay, in order for me to meet that unmet need, I need to tag in the following way. So that the user can have access to the information in the way they want it. I think that kind of proactive thinking is actually kind of rare. I agree with Ray that I use so many programs that if only they had