Why I Ditched Complex Folder Structures for Simple Tags

I have a confession to make: for years, I was obsessed with creating the perfect folder structure for my digital notes. I\'m talking nested folders, ten levels deep, with a complex naming convention that I thought was the pinnacle of organization. In reality, it was a prison of my own design. I spent more time agonizing over where a new note should live than I did on the actual content of the note. It was a classic case of majoring in the minors.

The great folder delusion

My thinking was rooted in the physical world. A piece of paper can only go in one filing cabinet drawer, in one specific folder. I tried to replicate this digitaly, believing that a rigid hierarchy was the only way to prevent chaos. The problem, I slowly realized, is that digital information isn\'t like paper. A single idea or a meeting summary can have multiple contexts.

For example, a note about a marketing strategy discussed in a project meeting—should it go in `/Projects/Project-Alpha/Meetings/` or `/Marketing/Strategies/2024/`? Or both? This led to what I call \'organizational paralysis.\' The friction of just saving a note was so high that I often just didn\'t bother, leaving brilliant ideas to evaporate from my short-term memory.

The \'aha\' moment with tags

The switch didn\'t happen overnight. It was a slow, gradual realization that I was solving the wrong problem. The goal isn\'t to *file* information perfectly; it\'s to *find* it easily when you need it. That\'s when I rediscovered tags. I\'d seen them in apps for years but dismissed them as messy and unstructured. I was wrong.

The magic of tags is that they provide multiple pathways to the same note. That marketing note no longer required a single, impossible decision. I could simply save it and add the tags: `#project-alpha`, `#marketing`, `#strategy`, and `#meetings`. Now, whether I\'m reviewing the project\'s progress or brainstorming new marketing ideas, the same note appears in context, effortlessly.

My simple tagging philosophy

To avoid creating a new kind of chaos with hundreds of meaningless tags, I set some ground rules for myself. This was the key to making the system work for me:

• Be consistent: I always use singular nouns (e.g., `#book` not `#books`).
• Think broad to specific: I might use `#project` as a general tag, and `#project-alpha` for specifics.
• Less is more: I aim for 3-5 highly relevant tags per note. If I need more, I question if the note should be split.
• Avoid redundancy: I chose `#meeting` and stick to it, rather than also using `#call` or `#sync-up`.

The practical benefits I\'ve experienced

Since making this shift, the change has been profound. Capturing a new idea is now frictionless. I open a new note, write, and add a few tags. Done. There\'s no folder hierarchy to navigate. Discovery has also become incredibly powerful. I can combine tags to surface hyper-specific information, like finding all notes tagged with `#idea` and `#marketing` that I wrote in the last month. It feels less like a rigid filing cabinet and more like a fluid, external brain that works *with* me, not against me. Honestly, I\'m getting more done, and the anxiety of \'keeping things organized\' has completely disappeared.