Use Tags to Organize Your Documents

Using a computer for our work and in our everyday life we generate a lot of digital material, which all gets stored on our computer’s hard disk. The ordinary way of doing this is by using a nested folder structure. But is that the only way to organize things?

In my documents folder I usually have a few main categories like ‘Projects’ or ‘Administration’, in which a whole tree structure of folders resides. The ‘Projects’ folder contains a folder for every year and in those folders I put a folder for each project.

There are always folders I use more than others, and most of the time I make a shortcut to those folders (in the OS X Finder ’sidebar’ for instance) so I don’t have to browse through the whole structure to find and open the document I want. But as I’m working on quite a lot of different things at the same time, those ‘favorite’ folders change often so I have to keep those shortcuts up to date manually.

We’re already used to tagging

Can we live without this folder structure? Will we trust our software enough to take control over organization of files? If we can, we can make use of a totally different, much faster system. Using tags! At first we might feel like losing control, but if it works, it might be a great improvement to our workflow.

The idea of tagging isn’t particularly new to most of us. A lot of websites use tags to represent relationships between items. On Last.fm you can tag music, on del.icio.us you can tag bookmarks, and almost all bloggers tag their posts. Most of the time those tags can be represented in a ‘tag-cloud’. To see the tag-cloud for Streamlined Mind go to the contact page.

Why tag?

Using tags to organize our documents we don’t have to worry about putting all documents belonging to a particular project in the right folder. We don’t even need folders anymore most of the time. Next to that it will be much easier to find the document we’re looking for, we can just type in the name of the tag we used and all files containing this tag will appear. OS X’s smart folders can also use these tags to determine their contents, so if you want to have a temporary folder for a particular project the tags will do the work for you.

How to make it work?

So how can we make this work on our own computer? The operating system doesn’t come with standard tagging capabilities enabled. The best way for now to tag documents in OS X is by using Spotlight comments. Use the ‘Get Info’ option on any file and you will be able to fill in comments that will be searchable with Spotlight. Tagging your entire catalog of files can be a lot of work, so luckily there are tools that can help you with this, like Quicksilver, Default Folder X and Punakea.

It’s a good idea to use a standard prefix for your tags, as Spotlight searches not just the titles but also the contents of a file, so you will get a lot of unwanted stuff cluttering your search results. Using tags like ‘&project’, with the ‘&’ as prefix will make sure this doesn’t happen.

I didn’t switch to using tags solely, as I’m still finding out what is the best way of implementing this. And some applications, like pro audio or video software, save files automatically in a ‘project folder’, containing the necessary elements for that project. You can still leave those folders intact of course and just put them in your documents folder after tagging the contents.

Are you using tags to organize your documents? Does it streamline your workflow? I would like to know!

Photo by mikecogh