Using labels, tags and categories productively [Hack Your Day]
I know that there are certain definitions for each of these, but let me tell you my views on how I use them, and how I think using them leads to productivity. Usually you can only use one of these, occasionally two, like in Wordpress, but you can usually substitute one of them by using folders, or other structure elements.
Categories
I think categories are the simplest to use, I just think of them as folders. I try to limit categories as much as I can in many cases I come up with a pre-fabricated category list. It doesn’t matter if you add to it a bit, but you should keep it as simple as possible.
The biggest problem I see is that people try to use categories to search for specific things. If you are looking for one specific article on the site for example you should not be able find it using categories. From user’s point of view it doesn’t make sense for two reasons. First of all, users can just use the search box or use tags as you will see later on. Second of all, if someone is looking for all Productivity posts, how would they be able to find them if all my categories are post specific?
Therefore categories should be used sparingly, splitting your content (or data) into well defined, easily identifiable groups that have something in common.
Tags
Tags are the ones you can use to individually “categorize” data. My post on how sleeping helps you in productivity would fall under the categories of lifestyle and productivity. I would (and have) assign it tags like “sleep” for example.
Tags should give you the answer to the question “what is this article about?”, sort of like keywords. Categories give you the answer to “What is the theme of this post?”. Tags enable you to search for content specifically, even though you don’t exactly know what you are looking for.
Tags can contain a lot of information, especially if you have the flexibility of a tag cloud like on del.icio.us. I hate having a flood of info, so at first I wasn’t happy using tags. I ended up with hundreds and never thought they’d make sense. Then along came tag clouds. The more I have of a tag the bigger the font and i can even choose to cut off unique tags. This truly helps in productivity, and organization, because it lets you tag your stuff with a lot of info, but allows you to view the most important ones if you need to.
In reality if you have a huge spike for one tag, say the word you tag second most is “shoe”, with an occurrence of 40. If your most used tag is “games” with 250 occurrences, you should consider making it a category.
Labels
Labels are a bit weird because different apps use them differently. I would say that most applications use them like tags, but this is sort of a gray area. If I would have the option to use all three at once, I would use labels just as I do in real life. I would label my posts with “important”, “general”, “specific”, and so on, to give me an idea of some other characteristics.
Original post here: Daniel
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