Tagging Is Broken

Source: https://fortelabs.co/blog/tagging-is-broken/

• using tags as a primary source of organization means you have to decide for every note which tag(s) you want to use.

  • You are relying on memorizing all the tags you have made.
  • This a lot of up-front cost.

• We offload some of our cognitive processing onto our environment, and this is much more capable of storing information than our brain does.

  • e.g.) method of loci, memory palace.

• This concept is called stigmergy (stigmergic cognition)

• Tags ignore stigmergy and force us to think about notes in abstract ways.

• In PKM, a constant temptation is to overorganize

  • too many categories
  • too many subdivisions

• As number of tags grew arithmetically, complexity grows geometrically.

  • A system that encourages tags is giving you explicit affordance to increase complexity.

• Tags were good when the cost of running a search was costly.

  • In these days, running a search is not a costly operation.
  • Thus the cost of tagging is almost completely wasted because almost the entire body of text could be broken into indexable, searchable "tags" that can be retrieved almost instantaniously.

---

Backlinks

• A Complete Guide to Tagging for Personal Knowledge Management
• Set up PARA (Private)
• Prune a Random Note