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💡 The Big Idea: Tags Are a Great Way to Keep Your Notes & Ideas Organized — If You Use Them Correctly

​Last week, I shared how I was using automation tools to help move files where they belong inside my Obsidian vault.

But folders are just one of the tools you can use to keep things neat and tidy.

In this newsletter, I want to share a few tips about using tags to effectively organize your notes & ideas.

What is Tagging?

Tagging as a way of organizing digital information has been around for a long time. It’s simply a way of applying a label to something so that you can easily find it again when you need it.

Sounds simple, right? 😉

One of the benefits of tagging is that you can apply multiple tags to the same piece of information. While there can only be a single location (folder) that contains a note, there is no limit to the number of tags you can apply to it. These tags can then be used to see related information together.

When it comes to tagging, there really isn’t a “right” way to do it. But a lot of people who feel proficient in all the other ways they use their digital devices still feel that, when it comes to tagging, somehow, they’re doing it wrong.

We’ll cover some best practices to help you overcome this in a minute. But first, let’s talk briefly about the mechanics of tagging notes in Obsidian.

The Basics of Tagging in Obsidian

There are two ways you can apply tags in Obsidian:

• At the Note level
• At the Line level

A note-level tag appears in the metadata at the top of the note. The most common way to view these note-level tags is using the Properties view, which can show multiple tags at the top of a note like so:

One way I use note-level tags is to categorize the individual Bible verses I’ve added to my Obsidian vault. I transferred all of my highlights from my paper Bible to the individual atomic notes in Obsidian, so now I can use the Tags view in my right sidebar (enabled with the activation of the Tags View Core plugin) to click on a tag and instantly open a search which shows me all of the notes/verses that have that tag applied.

You can also add inline tags to text in the contents of a note, creating a line-level tag. This can be useful for finding information in the contents of a specific note.

One of the ways I use line-level tags is for journaling. I have a couple of sections in my Daily Notes template for Journal Entries, Gratitude, and Wins where I capture entries when I journal at the end of the day.

I always add the entry as a bullet and then apply the proper tag at the end of the line:

This allows me to create a query that shows all of my journal entries. I’ve linked to that in my Personal Retreat template, which makes it easy to review all of my journal entries from the last quarter whenever I do my Personal Retreat.

With both of these examples, you may have noticed that you can nest tags in Obsidian. You can see this in both the note-level Bible tags (#bible/faith) and line-level Daily Questions (#journal/entry).

This helps you keep your tags organized, but it’s important to note that when you use sub-tags like this, both tags get applied.

For example, let’s say I have two entries on the same note:

• Wrote the newsletter on tagging #journal/entry
• Great response to the last Practical PKM cohort #journal/gratitude

In this example, there are two instances of the #journal tag, and one instance each of #enrty and #gratitude tags.

3 Rules for Tagging

When it comes to tagging, there are three specific rules you should follow:

• Tag consistently — If you’re going to use a tag for something, make sure that you use it the same way every time. If you don’t, your tag searches won’t be useful because they won’t show you everything you’re looking for.
• Tag sparingly — It’s easy to overdo it with tags. Just like with backlinks, less is often more. Not every note needs a tag, but every note that has a tag needs to mean something.
• Tag memorably — Just like PKM as a whole, tagging is very personal. Your tags don’t need to make sense to anyone else but you. The more memorable they are, the more likely you are to use them.

Following these rules will help you craft a tagging system that is both easy to remember and useful for finding what you’re looking for when you need it.

Tagging Best Practices

Here are a couple of other tips that can help you get more out of your tagging system:

• Don’t use spaces — In Obsidian, a line-level tag is determined by the text that immediately follows a # character somewhere in the note. Adding a space will break the tag, so try to keep it all together whenever possible.
• Keep your tags all lowercase — Obsidian does a good job of combining tags together (i.e. #journal and #Journal), but it’s a good habit to always use the same capitalization formatting when tagging. The easiest way to make sure you don’t mess this up, IMHO, is to keep everything lowercase.
• Use singular tags — A common mistake is to use plurals when using note-level tags (i.e. #books instead of #book). But if you have both #books and #book in your vault, which will create two separate tags (and decrease the likelihood that your query shows you everything you’re looking for). To prevent this, I always use singular tags.
• Utilize Autocomplete when tagging — The built-in autocomplete tool is your best friend when tagging, letting you select an existing tag so you don’t accidentally spell something wrong and create a new one.

Following these best practices ensures that you won’t end up with multiple tags that can cause confusion when trying to find what you’re looking for in your vault.

Fixing Your Previous Tagging Mistakes

Maybe you’ve been tagging for a while, and you realize you need to clean things up.

If that’s you, you’re probably dreading the thought of having to go back into your notes and manually update your tags.

Don’t worry 😉 There’s a community plugin that can help you with this.

The Tag Wrangler plugin lets you right-click on a tag in your Tags view and rename it.

Just type in the new tag (even if it’s one that already exists), and Tag Wrangler will update all instances of that tag throughout your Obsidian vault.

😎 Something Cool: Keep the Rhythm

One of the things I’ve been thinking about adding to my Daily Note template is some sort of mechanism to track the number of words I write each day.

Almost as if on cue, I saw an update come across the wire recently for a great-looking plugin called Keep the Rhythm, which displays the number of words written in a day via a visual heat map:

I’m a big fan of this plugin! It looks great and provides visual motivation to keep writing every day. The one negative for me is that the path filters are a little limited (you can only include or exclude a single path), but the developer has been very responsive and is currently working on the ability to use multiple conditions in the code block.

But even now, I find this plugin incredibly useful. If you want something to help you create more consistently in Obsidian, give this plugin a shot.

📚 Book Notes: Make It Stick

​Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel is a book about the science of successful learning. It’s an interesting book that I just read for a future Bookworm episode, where two cognitive scientists teamed up with a storyteller to disprove a bunch of common learning myths and share the science behind what really works when it comes to lifelong learning and self-improvement.

If you want to download my mind map book notes for this book, click here.

— Mike