After being dismissive of them relative to linking, I’ve come to think tagging might be more intuitive for me. I’ve stuck tags in a few notes, but I imagine I might profit from the experience of others. I’d like to keep my practice as simple as while maximizing utility.
I’ve checked what Obsidian help has to say about tagging. And I searched her for best practices. Most of what came up was tangential to my interest in the basics of tagging.
#obsidianapp #howto
I like to compare Obsidian’s tags with hashtags in social media. #hashtags #socialmedia I put them where I like them.
Note how this forum uses the following two tags. tags pkm I use a similar approach in Obsidian. Tags are visually distinct from the text. You click on them and get a list of all mentions of the same tag.
I would use tags only, if you find them obvious. Don’t try to force it. Many users never use any tags at all.
Tagging notes in Obsidian is a powerful way to organize, retrieve, and connect information. However, the “best” way depends on your workflow, note-taking style, and use case. Here are some practical recommendations and tips:
Ask yourself:
Use tags as big buckets (e.g., #project, #meeting, #idea).
For workflow: #todo, #inprogress, #review, #done.
Use descriptive tags for subjects: #python, #philosophy, #book, #productivity.
For time-specific notes: #2024, #Q1, #weekly.
Obsidian supports nested tags: #project/personal, #project/work, #meeting/clientA.
Example 1: Project Note
#project/work #client/AcmeCorp #status/inprogress
Example 2: Book Summary
#book #readinglist #philosophy
Example 3: Task Note
#todo #personal #priority/high
Tags are great for grouping across folders (e.g., all #meeting notes, regardless of location).
Use them in combination with links ([[notes]]) and folders for the best effect.
You can always add or refine your tagging system as your vault grows—don’t overengineer at first.
| Tag Type | Example | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Topic | #productivity | Finding related themes |
| Status | #todo, #draft | Workflow tracking |
| Project | #project/website | Group project notes |
| Person | #alice, #client/Bob | People-related notes |
| Time/Context | #2025, #workshop | Temporal/context grouping |
Remember: The best tagging system is the one you’ll actually use! Start with the minimum needed, then refine as you discover what works for you.
I have a different advice for beginners: don’t worry about creating or optimizing “systems”.
Be playful!
Hashtag are fun because you can sprinkle them anywhere. They are easy to add and easy to remove.
Of course you could build immensely complex systems with nested tags and controlled vocabularies and tags in frontmatter and tag pages and links as tags and tags as links and what not.
But you don’t have to.
You can also take a lighthearted and playful approach.
Thanks for the detailed reply, elements of which confirm me in the direction I was leaning: topic based tagging. Ambivalent about nested tagging. But with some cautions: start simple, be consistent, avoid over tagging. Where I’ve come down: start; learn from my practice; let it evolve. I imagine Tag Wrangler will be helpful with that.
Related experience has taught me: whatever system I might come up with in advance is going to be “off” in some way. Along with “start” and “keep it simple,” “be playful” is advice well taken.
In addition to the already advices, I would like to add a few thoughts I’ve got related to the topic.
Firstly to me tagging is intermediate in nature. If I want to tag something permanently, I’ll quickly rather think to use properties for that. So I wound rather use a type property to denote the type of the note, and a topic property for the overall topic of the note.
This helps me reducing clutter in the tag list, and allows for more efficient searches on either the type or topic (or similar). Other tags don’t interfere with that given property.
Secondly, I mainly use tags for action related purposes, or placeholders for something which I night need to take action on. For the latter, instead of creating links to every new person I encounter I rather place a tag, like #P/EricWeir. Then in due time I could decide that this person would deserve their own note or not, or should just remain tagged. This helps me not creating empty, uninteresting notes, while it still helps me build momentum for creating that note in the future of I find the need to do so.
The action related tags are described in the other posts, but this could be used to indicate what’s the next item in a project, or where I left off in reviewimg something, or which of many projects I’ve decided to work on in this period.
So in other words I do try to keep tagging to a minimum, and rather explore using properties instead. I do use nested values in both properties and tags, to help keep both the larger and the specific information available.
Lastly, I’ve also used heaps of custom statuses on tasks to both keep information queryable and categorised, and allow linking to them and making them stand out visually.
Apologies for taking so long to respond. Couple thoughts: it appears from what you say that your note taking is at least in part centered around projects.
A defect of mine is that it is not. That might be because I am retired and have no projects. My notes have to do with things outward that strike me as particularly interesting or inward about thoughts of my own related to a diversity of topics that interest me.
That’s probably another reasons why my notes don’t cohere: the diversity of topics that interest me is all over the map. Occasionally I briefly sense that there is something running through them that unites them, but the sense fades quickly and never becomes very specific or articulate.
The other thought relates to your mention of properties. I noted when properties first appeared as a feature of Obsidian but I ever looked into it. It struck me from a distance again as requiring a degree of clarity and specificity about my note taking that it simply does not have.
I hven’t accumulated a lot of mew otes since I last posted about tags, but tagging has been, as the responses to my query about taking suggested it could be, something I could must jump into without beinf very clear in starting about what I was getting into.
And when I look a my tags list now, I say, “Yeah, those are the right things,” and it’s not very long.
The best practice is to decide what you are going to use them for, if at all, and design your system around
that.
My vault’s organization strategy is “folders for filing, tags for search”
I currently only use 2 tags per note
When I first started taking notes in Evernote, tag strategy was “put as many as you can think of to make this note findable” . That resulted in quite a mess that I’m still in the process of cleaning up!
So , the second best practice might be “less is more” 
Thanks.
I’m retired. So I’m not using Obsidian for work. But I do have things I’m working on. Sorta.
There are a number of loosely defined “areas of interest.” There is one author whose work I’m trying to understand. There is one somewhat defined project related again to a few broad, loosely defined topics that normally would be thought to be only vaguely related but that are of great interest to me–ecology, epistemology, and politics–that I want to argue should be considered in relation to one another.
And I don’t have any output in mind other than possibly a few occasional “summations” of my findings and conclusions composed just for myself. I don’t envision publication. And there are no deadlines
So what’s the point regarding tagging? I guess it’s that I don’t have, and am unlikely to have, though I’ll keep an open mind, any very clear use for my tags. Probably the closest is the one you had with Evernote: making notes findable.
I do agree very much about less being more. Currently my list of tags would fit on a single double-spaced 81/2 x 11 page, and I don’t see it getting a lot longer. Maybe another full page at most. I imagine my tags list undergoing continuous revision.
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