Tags, Nested tags, Links/backlinks, Folders- What do you use? (Also, MOC's or Maps of Content pages)

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 18, 2021 at 12:43 PM

steveylang wrote:
How do you all organize your information- tags, nested tags,
>links/backlinks, folders, something else, nothing at all, or some
>combination of the above?
> >I’ve always been a folder guy (out of habit) but right now I’m thinking
>links/backlinks may be a better way of organizing information, and
>perhaps using tags for other metadata (status, type of note, etc.)

I think a lot depends on what the purpose of organising information is (such as what type of job you’re in, e.g. research, management, writing etc.), what the type and amount of information is that you are dealing with on a daily basis and what your working habits are (single machine and location, multiple different machines, OS’s, and locations) etc.

My situation is complex (needing to juggle management, with research, teaching etc.), using mutliple machines and locations (incl. virtual locations for where data is saved), with diverse and large amount of information coming my way (think of a fire hose).

I had to give up any ambition to organise all this information. It’s now about making an immediate judgement whether something is important to read, save, and tag or not, and if yes, whether it’s for short term or long term purposes, and then choose the system and approach that best suits that purpose.

I kind of established a 2-tier system.

For things that I need to deal with immediately and intensively for a short period of time I’d use Google Drive (using folders and search to find things), Google Sheets (to work things out to make decisions, and then being able to quickly find them again and refer to them - pastes nicely into Outlook emails as simple tables), and Roam for day-to-day task management, which also turns into a growing database of past tasks and decisions (where it’s all about automatic backlinks, and also forward linking into the future (linking items to future dates that will become relevant, so they are kind of “links to the future” and “backlinks from the future”)), so all this is accessible from any device from the browser.

For things that are needed for longer term memory, I’d organise them in folders on my local PC. But if there is anything that is super important, I’d also record that location in Roam and WorkFlowy, as ‘overlays’ or maps for whatever is saved in my folders.

I use WorkFlowy for longer-term planning, project tracking and memory management, though also sometimes to work out urgent issues quickly. In WorkFlowy the hierarchy is a kind of de facto folder organisation. I mainly use tags to annotate items, rather than a tool for organising.

The recent improvements in WorkFlowy though have created some interesting opportunities. Recently I needed to design a database for being able to quickly filter items on a variety of criteria (to help analyse different scenarios, such as different opportunities that arise on the basis of different combinations of criteria being selected), and WorkFlowy has turned out to be amazing for this, as I could build quite a sophisticated database, where individual items can contain external links, images, lots of text etc., but it’s easy to analyse the data by filtering for different combination of criteria (using tags), and the ability to add colour to different tags and items also helps visually understand the situation.

So you can whittle down a long list of hundreds of items which otherwise would be hard to get an overview of into a handful, by just continuing to click on different tags (to narrow results gradually), as the displayed results are gradually reducing in number to even one or two items being displayed, as the outcome of a particular line of logic. Yes, you could try to do this in Excel or Google Sheets or some other database software and use filters, but each WorkFlowy item can hold so much richer data than a cell or row can, and it’s quicker and easier to click on the tag to filter for it, than using spreadsheet filters.

I guess this was a long answer to say that I use many different tools with many different organising principles for different purposes. Maybe I have a tendency to do this, but I can’t see how else I could deal with the amount of information that is coming my way, and given the need to do both short-term decision making and longer term planning and information retrieval.

Yes, it is a bit of a mess, but I’ve given up on the idea of a single approach or system, as it’s too time-consuming to construct one and then stick to it, and one tool or approach doesn’t suit all the needs, and the needs are often changing.

Maybe the “single system” is the particular combination of the various toolchains and workflows that I use across these multiple software and devices, which itself keeps changing and evolving as situations change.

BTW, the “fire house” is essentially a constant stream of emails (and their attachments) coming in via Outlook (even that I need to manage using two separate tools, the Outlook Windows client and the Outlook web client), as well as info coming in via MS Teams chats and posts.