Things
Tags
A tag is a #hashtag that groups things across every list and day at once.
Tags are free for everyone.
Why you'd care
Lists are places. A thing lives in exactly one. Tags are the other axis: a way to pull together everything about a topic no matter which day or list it landed on.
That matters because capture is deliberately careless. You write onto Today without deciding, and a tag is how you retroactively make a topic out of a hundred scattered lines.
The 60-second version
Type # followed by a word inside a thing, or press ⌘⇧T to pick from your existing tags.
Step by step
Finding tagged things
Searching #tag returns the lists the tag appears in rather than a flat pile of things. That is deliberate: a tag is usually a topic, and topics are more useful grouped. See search.
Search on several tags at once to narrow further. #work #urgent needs both tags. A minus excludes a tag, so #work -#done shows work that is still open.
The Tags view shows every tag you use, with counts.
Tags are case-insensitive
#Work and #work are the same tag, so you cannot accidentally split a topic in two by capitalising differently.
Going further
Do not tag everything. Search already finds things by their words. A tag earns its place when the words vary but the topic does not, like #recipe across lines that never say "recipe".
Tags can become lists. A dynamic list is defined by a tag filter rather than by contents, so it stays current without you moving anything. See dynamic lists.
Match all or any. A dynamic list filtered on several tags can require all of them or any of them, which is the difference between narrowing and widening. Search always requires all of them.
Settings that change this
- Settings Lists & things Tag order orders your tag list by use, count or alphabetically.
- Settings Lists & things Tag filter match sets whether new filters match all tags or any.
- Settings Lists & things Make lists for tags generates a list per tag automatically.
- Settings Lists & things Show tags in side menu puts your tags in the side menu.
- Settings Lists & things Reset tag counts recounts your tags when a count has drifted out of sync.
Tips
- Fewer than ten tags is a system. Fifty tags is a second filing problem.
- Tag the exception, not the rule. If nearly everything gets
#work, the tag tells you nothing.