You’re taking the right steps. The best thing to do is in fact to overdo. But overdo with small detail, not with general repetition. In other words, don’t just use high level general categories when tagging…tags that you probably overuse or are just broadstrokes that may not help you find things. 500 articles tagged with one term are hard to sort through.

Instead, use specific tags and use lots of them even if that tag only ends up being used once or twice out of every 500 items you’re categorizing. It’s best to be specific so you can find things, while the general categorization is more useful for machines or for high level analysis (“I tagged 200 articles about productivity so clearly it’s on my mind” is useful for analysis but not for finding specific articles).

I ask rather than declaim because I’m further behind you on the curve of this switch to the new, search-based way of doing things. My hard drive looks like a tag-and-folder yard sale, and my delicious, StumbleUpon, etc is worse–I’m terrified of doing it wrong and not being able to find stuff, so I overdo it.

I know this is wasted time. And I know I’m not the only one grappling with this. And while I also know that taxonomy ain’t everything, it would be helpful to have some reassurance in the form of a system–a way of looking at things, i.e. principles, or an actual system.

If you can come up with a way to do this, you will rule at least part of the new known world. I mean, I’d pay for that sh*t and I’m a cheap bastard!

I see nothing wrong with a few highly focused folders for specific purposes. The only problem comes when they write a message that contains multiple points that you might want to refer back to…but one of them relates to a scheduling issue.

When it comes to tagging, I don’t think Outlook does a good job with categories, whereas Gmail does a great job with labels. In either case, a tag could be used in place of putting those messages in a folder. Nonetheless if there aren’t many of these special cases, then there’s no harm done.

For instance, when I hire someone new I create a folder specifically for that job as I usually get a ton of responses in 2-3 days. Then afterwards I’ll dump all those replies into my generic correspondence folder, but just put a tag on them for job-applicant.

So it’s useful to recognize when folders can help to really bring out a particular category and when they can get in the way by adding one more decision to the filing process.

Cheers!

Thanks for the good article. I do think that there’s room for a hybrid system — a few folders, plus the “big pile.”

In my wife’s work, for example, she handles scheduling for co-workers, so she needs to know when they’ll be on vacation. But when they send email to her with that information, they don’t use consistent terminology: one person “will be out” from July 12-15, one person “will be on holiday,” one person “will be at a conference,” etc. So there’s no consistent tag to use for retrieval. In this case, a “Scheduling” folder is very useful.

Unless I’m missing something. Is there a better way?