A critique of tagging

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 5, 2023 at 02:19 PM

Dellu, agree with your last statement. Forte’s statement on tag use is very arbitrary. Interestingly, in the bonus chapter dealing with tags, of his Second Brain book he makes a case for using tags, and his concern about them is more nuanced than what he wrote in the medium article. Where I still have an issue is with his concern that tags require so much effort, etc.
While that may be true for him and some others, my experience is that working with a tag list, and the fact items can exist in more than one place, is easier, faster and more precise, than using folders. Forte’s experience has obviously been different and that’s cool.
At the end of the day day I find using tags
- Daly

Dellu wrote:
I think Forte’s attitude about tags is expressed in the book:
> >
>>I don’t recommend using tags as your primary organizational
>system. It takes far too much energy to apply tags to every single note
>compared to the ease of searching with keywords or browsing your
>folders. >However, tags can come in handy in specific situations when
>the two previous retrieval methods aren’t up to the task, and you
>want to spontaneously gather, connect, and synthesize groups of notes on
>the fly
> >In other words (my understanding of Forte is):
>- he opposes using tags as a general organization tool (replacing
>folders, or some other means).——I personally agree with this point
>- But, he still thinks they can be used effectively for narrower cases:
>for the PARA system where you can use tags to collect documents that
>belong to a specific project——again, I agree with this one.
> >The problem with the medium article is he seems to mostly discourage
>people to use tags.