Folders or tags? Folders are outdated. Learn how tags offer a smarter, flexible way to organize and retrieve digital information.

In the good old times, a document was in a folder, or it wasn’t. “It’s in the blue folder in the cabinet right behind my desk”.

Offices were lined with folders. Moving offices was a heavy-work task. I earned my first summer job money by moving folders from one office building to another.

That was in 1997.

Enter digital transformation. With all the change it brought along, somehow, the folder survived. This has made it easier to move your office—just take your laptop, leave the old office, go to the new office, and continue working.

That might seem like an advantage, but digital folders brought huge disadvantages along. Why?

Hyperlinks

Together with the internet, a new concept came up: The hyperlink. While the relationship between document and folder was 1-to-1 in the paper days, the relationship between digital documents is now many-to-many: Each document can contain hyperlinks to many other documents, irrespective of what folder they are stored in.

Later on, a digital transformation made it possible to use information not just in documents, but in small blocks, snippets, or modules widely distributed. And each of these blocks can contain many hyperlinks.

Here is my thesis: folders are too rigid in a digital, hyperlinked, modular information landscape. Typically, folders are nested, and you need to know exactly how to navigate to that sub-sub-sub-folder to find the required piece of information.

Tags

What can you do? Use tags instead. You can still display tags hierarchically in a way that they resemble folders.

The best example of this is Gmail. Whilst you might think that your emails are organized in folders, they are tagged, with the tags being displayed hierarchically. This has the great advantage that you can tag each email with as many tags as you want, and you will still find it under all of the tags-displayed-as-folders. You can also create a structure with your tags with as many hierarchies as you like.

Creating a folder or tag hierarchy is a recipe for disaster. It won’t take long before you confuse yourself and don’t find your information anymore. The quick cures are shortcuts on your desktop, duplicating information, or asking your intern to reorganize the folder structure on the file server.

Here is my suggestion for a modern information landscape: Instead of using folders or hierarchical tags, use flat tag clouds. To give structure and filter possibilities, just apply multiple tags to each piece of information.

A Practical Example

Sounds theoretical? Here is an example of how I use it in practice. To organize my personal information, I use Obsidian. Everything I read, bullet point meeting notes, ideas, etc. goes into Obsidian. Preferably with hyperlinks to the corresponding websites, from where I received the information.

Then I tag each piece of information with multiple tags:

  • A subject tag — what topic is the piece of information about?
  • A source tag — where does the piece of information come from?
  • A people tag — who gave me that piece of information, with whom did I discuss it, and whom did I recommend it?
  • A product tag — what product will I use the information for?
  • An action tag — do I need to investigate the topic further, discuss it with somebody, or read it in a quiet minute?

The big advantage of this system is that I can retrieve information in different ways, but each way leads me to the same information. Let’s take a specific example:

  • “I remember there was an article on cyber security I haven’t read. Since I will meet with someone involved in cyber security, I want to read it before the meeting.”
    I would filter for #toread (action tag), then #cybersecurity (subject tag).
  • “I need to prepare for my ISO 27001 audit. What information on cyber security did I read since the last ISO 27001 audit?”
    I would filter for #cybersecurity (subject tag), then filter for all information without action tag, and then filter for dates between the last ISO 27001 audit and today.
  • “I meet with a friend tomorrow, with whom I regularly share articles. Let’s see what topics we were discussing recently.”
    I would filter for the person (people tag), and then see that besides that cyber security article, we also discussed geopolitics on various occasions. Somehow cyber security and geopolitics go hand in hand. It looks like we will have yet another interesting discussion when we meet tomorrow.

All of the above filter operations lead to the same piece of information, namely that cyber security article.

Try finding that article again if you have buried it in some sub-sub-sub-folder on your Google Drive.