How to approach tags in your personal knowledge management (PKM) system
Tags work best when they’re useful at the level of an individual note.
Updated May 8, 2022
When you use tags, they spread. They want to appear everywhere. And appearing everywhere, we tend to have a global, top-down organization, process, or governance for the tags we use. You see something used everywhere, so you want to optimize it.
Unfortunately, tags, themselves resist optimization.
Tags love sprawl
Tags lend themselves to sprawl. It’s easy for expansive human brains to associate lots of tags with lots of things. Tag sprawl makes it diffucult to approach a collection of information. Tags lump into large, useless lumps of data difficult to navigate and sort through. From the outside, tags look like a mess.
Tags hate maintenance
Similarly, maintaining and evolving tags becomes a pain. To update a tag used on 100s or 1000s of items, hope your system offers an easy way to rename tags. And, if you want to change *how* you tag things across 100s or 1000s of notes, you probably need to visit 100s or 1000s of notes, manually, to add or remove tags.
