I have experimented lately with a better tag structure for Dynalist that both incorporates GTD (Getting things done) and Second brain or Zettelkasten(Personal CRM, Personal wiki, Thought incubator). I think these techniques will be useful to anyone who donât want their tags to devolve into a mess.
For GTD I like to make clearly defined edges and I want my tasks not to get lost among my other tags. I also find that using the tags inline as verbs works better for my brain as it forces me to make evey action actionable .
â##|Draft proposal to Xâ
is better than:
âWrite proposal to X #Draftâ
Every task gets a context that shows me where I can do it.:
@@Digital
@@Office
@@Home
For Secondbrain/Zettelkasten/personal wiki I like to do it like this:
This is really great, thanks for sharing! Iâve been diving into Zettelkasten and was struggling with how to sort out my tags. This is a great jumping off point for me, but I was wondering how you tag more personal plans and events? How would you tag a birthday party or your parentsâ anniversary?
As to your question:
I separate work and personal projects and actions in two different documents. This way you can have a separate tag pane for each. If I want to see all my personal projects I just go to my personal document and click on the tag â@@Projectâ tag. Likewise for the work projects. If I want to see all my projects there is a search for showing all tags in all documents. (ctrl+enter)
Zettlekasten is another document. Since it contains my thoughts I deem it private and therefore separate from my work. Even though many thoughts are related to my work.
So a birthday for me would be a project. Eg:
Daves Birtday @@Project (In the note field I add which area of responsibility it belongs to and the ideal outcome.) @@AOR Happy , grateful, and inspired family, friends and colleagues Ideal outcome: A celebration of Dave and life where friends and family can get to know and understand each other better and have a good times with pink unicorns for young and old.
Thank you for formalizing this approach - I had folders for work and school, and I recently turned them into pages with items I expand and collapse as I need them. This is a great example of how a one-major-topic-per-page can be very powerful.
This example is great for when you are an active part of an event, but I guess I meant more in the vein of a calendar or âfuture logâ if weâre talking in bullet journal parlance.
I suppose I could tag them with the personâs specific tag instead of having a âbirthdayâ tag (#@&Dougâs Birthday vs Dougâs #birthday) - then the recurrences would accumulate on that person instead of on a global birthday tag. Does that make sense?
May be I am missing something. But birthdays I try to keep in my calendar. But you could use Dynalist as a personal contacts management system and add birthdays too.
In my Dynalist there are hundreds of @ tags making autocomplete useless. @@ tags on the other hand are only a few. This lets me use the autocomplete feature in a sane manner.
Same goes for all the other tags that part of my GTD setup. That is why I use #| for creation tags, #( for consumption tags and #& for communication tags and so on.
All other hashtags that are not part of my GTD setup. Like #ZettelKasten topics, html colours and trending topics I can just leave as is.
Iâm attempting to put everything in my dynalist. I have a master âchronicalâ where I input things by date, and then they sync to my google calendar, so tagging will get more important as I enter more information.
For example, before your post about tags, I was entering birthdays as: âDougâs #birthday !(03-17-20 | 1y)â. This is fine, but I can only search on #birthday, which will show me everyoneâs birthday. With your tagging system, Iâm changing these types of items to â@&Dougâs birthday !(03-17-20 | 1y)â, which will let me search for everything Doug related.
I tag other items as #plans, #work, etc so that way I can use IFTTT to split these items among several calendars once theyâve been imported to my master âincomingâ calendar.
First, you want to turn off google calendar sync on whichever pages you have it turned on. Youâll want to make a bucket for all of the dates to go to in google calendar, so I set up a calendar called âincomingâ. Because we tag, we can then use IFTTT to split the events on a search.
In IFTTT, make a new applet. Youâll have to connect whatever services youâre using. Iâm sending google calendars to another google calendar, so it only needs the one connection, but you could send these events to any calendar service IFTTT (or zapier, etc, etc) works with. The trigger action is Google Calendar > New event from search added. I select the calendar âincomingâ and type whichever tag I want to filter (#plans, letâs say, but could be any tag)
The completed action will then be Google Calendar > create detailed event. Youâll pick the calendar you want the filtered events to go to, and you can set what fields get filled with what information from the original event. Create the action, turn google sync on in dynalist, and wait for the magic to happen.
You have to create a new applet for each tag you want to filter, but it doesnât take too long.
I had to go in and manually trigger the first syncs in IFTTT after dynalist had uploaded everything to my incoming calendar, but they automatically update after that.
Iâm not fully understanding what is happening here. A couple of questions:
Are you using Symbols like #, =, ! to make autocomplete faster?
On what document structure is this based? All in one file?
Are you searching for the tags, or do you also have searches bookmarked that you use as views (e.g for current tasks)
Iâm currently trying to setup Dynalist as a Second Brain. I have four documents: Inbox, Projects, Areas and Resources. In Resources I save mostly articles. I donât use tags there, but I think I should. Currently Iâm working with topics (e.g Design, Business etc) and below that topics are all my notes.
Articles I would tag as they relate to a thought/concept in Zettlekasten.
I am changing my tag setup a little so search is a little easier for all next actions. Iâll update my example file and original post as soon as I have experimented a little more. For the moment I am leaning towards all next action tags/verbs having two ## in the start of the tag.
Iâm getting ready to set up my Dynalist for the first time and your suggestions are indispensable, thank you! To clarify, are you keeping the #| #( #& tags system? And continuing to use those action tags for certain entries â adding the extra # in the beginning to distinguish Next Actions specifically?
If youâre keeping the #| #( #& tags system, how do you decide whether youâll tag a task that way vs not tagging the action at all?
