I’ve been neglecting this feature in Obsidian for the longest time, but recently I decided to upgrade the way I use tags in Obsidian. There was one resource in particular that helped me…
The book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte has sold all around the globe, and it seems like the majority of people interested in PKM have heard about the system and principles it teaches.
Fewer know about the secret chapter offered at the end of Tiago’s book. This chapter talks about building an effective tagging system within your second brain.
This article’s going to cover what Tiago talks about in this chapter, and then I’ll talk about how you can implement the strategies in an Obsidian context.
Let’s get started…
Introduction and The Problem with Tagging
Tiago talks about how the greatest thinkers, until recently, were trying to group all of the knowledge in the world into categories. However, because of the rise of the ‘volume and complexity’ of our knowledge in just the last century or so, there’s no way that this is now possible.
The categories would ‘either be too broad to be useful or too narrow to be universal’.
Thinking about this, why should we try and encompass all our work in a selection of tags?
Forte thinks that it’s a waste of time to try and categorise notes with tags upfront before you have figured out what the note’s contents is going to be used for.
He thinks that tags should be used to ‘facilitate effective action’ instead. After all, the note-taking process is just means to create meaningful output. This corresponds with the theory behind Building a Second Brain, where the word behind the letter E in the underlying acronym CODE stands for ‘Express’.
Tagging is an Advanced Technique
Forte suggests that you should only start adding tags once you have completed several projects and taken many notes. This is so that you don’t get convinced to tag your notes for the sake of it.
If you’re not up to this point yet, don’t worry about tagging and instead make sure that you’re actually using your notes to create something that can be shared in the world.
Three Actionable Approaches to Tagging
When tagging your second brain, your tags should be used to:
- Record how your notes will be used
- Record how your notes are being used
- Record how your notes have been used
An example of the first or second of these might be if you want to use or are using information in one of your notes in a paper — you could tag this note and those similar with the word source
. Similarly, if you have an idea on a note that you might want to turn into a piece to publish online, you might tag it with the word article
.
Forte says that there are four categories that cover the use cases that notes are involved in. You’d tag by these:
- According to the final product a note will be used in e.g.
article
ornewsletter
- According to the kind of information contained in the note e.g.
theory
orevidence
- According to a role a note plays in a project e.g.
outline
orgoals
- According to the current stage they’re part of in the workflow e.g.
to-do
,in-progress
orcomplete
It’s important to realise that sometimes notes might not have clear tags before they are used within a project, so Forte acknowledges that there’s purpose to tagging notes retroactively.
The advantage is that digital information is very flexible, meaning that you can much easier organise your notes after they’ve been used than if they were a physical item.
The Benefits of Actionable Tagging
The main benefit here is that you’re not obliged to rigorously tag every one of your notes. There is the peace of mind that you can complete the project and tag notes later on, once you’ve realised what category they lie in. This is also because in Building a Second Brain, tags aren’t the primary method of organisation.
Forte closes by saying that this is one huge benefit of digital notes — you can find an approach that works for you and constantly refine and update your notes — they are on a screen so are infinitely updateable.
Implementing this in Obsidian
Much of this information is found in my guide to YAML metadata in Obsidian. Because YAML is more complex than simply typing a tag in-line (still completely viable), much of the information here is going to focus on this method of adding tags.
Tag-Editing/Modifying Plugins:
- Tag Wrangler is a must if you already have tags that you want to edit or pare down to the bare minimum. It allows you to fuse two similar tags together, delete tags, search for tags and create pages specific to the tags that you use.
- MetaEdit is useful if you manage your tags in the YAML metadata of your files. This plugin allows you to quickly modify or add YAML tags from anywhere in your document, as well as adding options for quick selection of tags within the editing modal.
- Linter is a powerful plugin that allows you to format tags consistently in the YAML of your notes. It’s nice to get the formatting consistent when you use the tags with other plugins, like the ones I’m going to list now…
Tag-Implementing Plugins:
- Dataview can display lists and tables of your notes, all organised by tags. During our recent interview (article coming soon…) I learned this is how 🌿Annette Raffan 🌼uses tags when managing her sources during PhD research.
- Supercharged Links allows you to modify how links appear within your notes. You have options to modify the colour, weight and underline of the links, dependent upon what tags (and other properties) the note has. You can also place text or emojis at the end or the start of each link type, allowing you to gain context when viewing notes.
Remember to keep things as simple as possible, using tags to facilitate the production of work rather than tagging for the sake of tagging!
If you want to read the secret chapter of Building a Second Brain, it can be found here. I hope I’ve given you some actionable advice you can create value from, and as always, thanks for reading!