Optimized Note-taking
A tagging system to organize your notes
Note Taking Systems and Tags
Effective note-taking systems are a must for those interested in productive knowledge management systems. From Zetellkasten to the PARA system, there are many great options out there.
I am periodically looking to improve my pipeline of knowledge management, and, upon testing multiple systems for note taking, I realized the underappreciated value of tags for notes. So, in this post I will be sharing my tagging system to optimize your notes.
Types of tags
Tags are like micro bridges that allow you to give your overall knowledge storage a language to communicate high level organizational aspects of your notes.
For me, tags can be one of 3 types:
- Status Reflects the stage in which the note is in, given an implicit timeline of possible development states.
- Contextual Reflects the context in which a note was created like where you found the information or who showed you that information for the first time.
- Conceptual Reflects a superficial account of the topics, ideas or concepts involved in that particular note like the subject, study area or others
The tagging system I will describe is embedded in my notes design, for which I will first give you first a quick overview.
Overview of a note
My notes on a nuthsell my notes combine aspects of the Zettelkasten system, the PARA method and with some general principles from the Get Things Done method and the Evergreen Notes.
The basic template layout is very simple:
- A status tag on the top (more on those later) indicating the stage of development of that note
- The body of the note (forming a concise description of a concept or piece of information)
- A references header on the bottom of the note
The design of my notes follows these basic principles:
- Atomic
Notes should be a building block that explicitly makes one individual point.
2. Densely connected
Notes should connect with each other through hyperlinks (or tags) that reference other notes semantically (the concepts should be linked).
3. Prefer associated ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
This is a great tip from Andy Matuschak that basically suggests that instead of trying to find fixed hierarchies (like a standard folder structure) you should associate concepts directly in the notes referencing other notes.
4. Notes should be personal
Your notes should reflect your thoughts and ideas about a subject and not some copied content from the internet. By doing this you improve recall because you are be optimizing for insight.
The idea is to keep this knowledge system as modular as possible with notes as the smaller building blocks that allow this to happen.
For these notes to be as useful as possible, I pair them with tags that give them some special meaning to help me keep organized and place them in an implicit organization structure that can be manipulated to fit my productivity needs.
A tag system to rule them all
Following the 3 general types of tags that I mentioned, my actual tags are:
- Current Layer Status Tag These tags reflect the status of progressive summarization of my notes, they fall in a continuum of custom layers of compressed complexity. The sub-types here are:
- #raw
The raw tag means that a note was just added and I haven’t processed the corresponding information a lot and just placed it there while learning, researching or working.
- #reviewed This one indicates that the current note has been reviewed once, so it should have a more compressed appearance.
- #summarized This note reflects one of the last stages of a note, where it has been reviewed twice and compressed to some optimal state that makes it seamless to recall. This note should be succinct, to the point and effective.
- #transformed This one reflects the moment where, beyond having produced and reviewed a note, I actually used it to some transformational extent, like using it for an article, a research journal or whatever transformation that gives that note life within the overall system.
2. Context tags
These are tags that indicate the context in which I came about a piece of information. This context can be a lecture, a video, a person, anything that can be summarized to a word that immediately brings me back to the environment where that information was attained. The tag structure is: #nameOfContextSource.
3. Conceptual Tag
These are the tags that reflect the topic of concept being discussed in a note or concepts related to that note. These can be a field of study like mathematics (#math) or a more specific area like #optimization or #linearAlgebra.
General advantages of using tags
These tags coupled with principles from evergreen notes, and the other systems I mentioned, build a knowledge management system that is alive and constantly evolving. Three advantages worth mentioning are:
- Tags enforce some hierarchy to facilitate moving around
- Tags facilitate building a network structure for your notes
- Tags facilitate manufacturing connections with an explicit intention
Summarizing the value of tags for your notes
Whatever system you follow, you can benefit from using tags to label your notes according to a rational that will guide you when you are reviewing your notes or using them to write. The takeaways I mean to convey from this post are:
- Tags are useful tools to organize your notes
- A good system divides tags in: contextual, complexity status and conceptual
- Tags facilitate building a connected system of notes that are easy to review
If you want to dig deeper into note-taking and productivity systems in general, I recommend this course from skillshare:
This is an affiliate link, if you use the course I get a small commission, cheers! :)
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