I add tags by topics, person, company name, project title…whatever will quickly bring together notes with a common theme. Examples:
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#JohnSmith – obviously quickly finds all notes involving John Smith, which could be many varied things scattered throughout my notes.
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#ProjectName – everything having to do with a certain project, which could be notes on items purchased, vendor discussions, etc.
- #CompanyName
- …(you get the picture)…
So that’s the basic idea. My basic method for organizing notes is by topics (e.g., Tech, Psnl, Work, etc.) with many sub topics under each major topic.
I also keep a DROE (Steven Covey) – with a quick log of all the major activities for a given day…many of which are links to more detailed notes in the Topic Listing just mentioned.
But as notes accumulate, there may be something related to #JohnSmith or #CompanyName under many of these topic headings or DROE entries. Searching for a #TagName at the top level quickly reveals all the entries related to a given person or company. I scan these to quickly isolate the specific notes I need – and zoom in to focus on just those notes.
So I drop tags throughout my notes that I know will help me find the note later without remembering where I filed it, just by knowing who was involved or the major topic involved.
Very, very handy. In a flash I can, for example, find all events related to a given person going back over the last year. No other program allows me to find widely disparate notes and then jump to the one needed as quickly as Dynalist.
I use Dynalist all day long. I really count on it. I’m a firm believer of the old (I believe Chinese) proverb, "The palest ink is better than the best memory.”
See this article on keeping meeting notes. I keep at least a few lines logging each meeting I’m in – key participants, what was agreed upon, actions to me or them, etc. And meetings are just one portion of my work and hence just a portion of my notes.
I’m a very busy manager dealing with many projects, people, and companies. Finding information on any of these quickly is invaluable. But there are a lot of topics, people, projects, and companies – hence a lot of tags.
BTW, this should help clarify why I would benefit from tag auto-completion in the search bar. I can typically recall the name of the people, project, etc., involved and so know how a tag starts. But I can’t recall quickly the exact spelling – for example, whether there’s an “s” at the end or did I hyphenate vs run all the words together, etc.
I wind up using the top few lines of a document to enter my search instead of using the search box. This way I get auto-complete assistance in entering the tag. Then I can click on it and get the search I want.
It makes no sense to me that I get tag auto-completion in the document, but not in the search bar. In any case, I would find this feature very helpful. As I mentioned, Workflowy does this and that’s where I got used to it.