The Tag System That Finally Made Sense for Me - From Perfectionism Paralysis to Discovery Freedom
How I finally built a tag system that works by combining structured type tags with liberal topic tagging
For years, I wrestled with tags in my knowledge system. I’d spend 10 minutes agonizing over the “perfect” set of tags for a single note, only to later search for #books and get buried in hundreds of results: some actual book notes, most just notes that mentioned books somewhere.
In this article, I want to share the tag system breakthrough that transformed my relationship with my notes and unlocked the true power of my knowledge base.
Introduction
If you’re building a knowledge system as a creator, you’ve probably hit the tag wall. You know tags are supposed to help you find things, but somehow they create more problems than they solve.
Maybe you’ve tried the minimalist approach; just a handful of carefully chosen tags. Or the opposite, tagging everything with every possible keyword until your tag list looks like alphabet soup. Perhaps you’ve spent hours designing the “perfect” tag taxonomy, only to abandon it three months later when it stops making sense.
In practice, most tag systems fail not because they’re poorly designed, but because they’re designed at all.
The tag system that finally worked for me emerged from a simple realization: tags aren’t a filing system; they’re a discovery system. And once I stopped treating them like folders and started treating them like search tools, my knowledge base improved heavily.
This matters because as creators, our knowledge isn’t just something to organize. It’s the raw material for everything we create. When you can’t find your notes, you can’t repurpose them. When your tag queries break, your content pipeline breaks. When you’re paralyzed by tag decisions, you’re not creating.
