In response to my post Renaming Tags, Karl Voit pointed me to his recent post on How To Use Tags. He said that his system could solve many of the problems I experience with using tags. It’s a long post with lots of good advice but the heart of it are 8 rules he uses for choosing tags. It’s definitely worth taking a look at those rules if you use tags.
The two rules that would most help me are:
- Use as few tags as possible
- By convention, tags are plural
My major problem is #1. Rather than deciding on a specific set of tags, I tend to make them up as I go along. All of my tagging is happening in an Org Mode context so I get a list for the first tag but I’m on my own for any subsequent tags so I can’t see what I’ve used before. Voit’s tagging system is more general and acts at the file level so his tools have a way of handling this problem.
After dealing with grocery/groceries for a while I (sort of) settled on a rule of using the singular form but I didn’t make it a hard rule. A lot of my problems would disappear if I strictly enforced this rule.
Even if I religiously followed Voit’s suggestions, I would still find myself needing to bulk change tags so I’m grateful for Sagar’s post. Still, if you’re a tag user, you can make your life a lot easier by reading and following the advice in Voit’s post.