David Wilson over at System Crafters has an interesting video that explains his system for using tags on his Org tasks. The nice thing about his method is that it’s easy to implement. The hardest part is choosing a list of tags that makes sense for your workflow. Wilson has some suggestions that he used to pick his list.
Once you have the list of tags, everything else is mechanical. The best idea is to add the tags to the org-tag-alist variable so that you enter them easily—with a single key— when you’re adding a new task. Wilson’s example has 3 different files that contain his tasks according to what type they are. I use a template for entering my tasks but Wilson shows how to do it by simply adding a new line to the appropriate file.
When you want to work on tasks with a specific tag, you need only bring up the agenda and filter by the tag(s) you’re interested in. Take a look at the video for the details and to get a sense of how using tags can improve your workflow.
The video is 20 minutes, 36 seconds long so you’ll need to schedule some time but you’ll probably find it a worthwhile investment. As I said, the method is pretty simple and easy to implement. And using templates to enter your tasks will help even more.